"Showtime Brothers!" A vision of the Bosnian war: Srđan Dragojević's Pretty Villages, Pretty...

Central Europe Review

______________________________________________________________________________________ 2000 Central Europe Review Ltd All Rights Reserved. May Not Be Copied or Distributed

Central Europe Review (http://www.ce-review.org/)

The Celluloid Tinderbox

Yugloslav screen reflections of a turbulent decade

Edited by Andrew James Horton




Published by Central Europe Review Ltd, UK 2000 Copyright © 2000 Central Europe Review Ltd

All rights reserved The respective authors of individual chapters in this volume have asserted their rights under the Copyright,

Designs and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the authors of their w ork.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by w ay of trade or otherw ise, be lent, resold, hired

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imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Central Europe Review Ltd, Holly Cottage,

Ellerdine Heath, Telford, Shropshire TF6 6RP

Great Britain ISBN: 1-84287-002-5

Editor: Andrew James Horton

Editorial Assistants: Pat FitzPatrick, Julie Hansen, Paul Nemes, Niobe Thompson




Table of Contents Editor�s Note I. Introduction

Dina Iordanova II. Who Will Take the Blame?

How to make an audience grateful for a family massacre by Péter Krasztev

III. Critical Mush The South Bank Show gives Emir Kusturica an easy ride by Andrew James Horton

IV. �Showtime Brothers!� A vision of the Bosnian war: Srđan Dragojević�s Lepa sela, lepo gore by Igor Krstić

V. An Aesthetic of Chaos The blurring of political subtexts in film depictions of the Bosnian war by Benjamin Halligan

VI. Serbia�s Wound Culture

Teenage killers in Milo�ević�s Serbia: Srđan Dragojević�s Rane by Igor Krstić

VII. Vignettes of Violence

Some recent Serbian screen attitudes by Andrew James Horton

Appendices The Authors Also of Interest... CER�s eBook Series




Editor�s Note

All hyperlinks in this volume (denoted by text in maroon) are correct and working at the

time of going to press. Owing to the transitory nature of some sites, it can not be guaranteed

that all links will function in perpetuity. Similarly, links to Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk

represent availability at the time of publication. Items on these sites may be removed,

modified or added over the course of time.




Introduction Dina Iordanova

When Yugoslavia dissolved and the new successor states claimed their respective

territories, those working in cultural history came to realise that the division of cultural assets

could not occur automatically along the new fault lines. It was difficult to keep everyone

happy in assigning them the cultural tradition they claimed. Artistic heritage became a

contested territory: in cinema, tradition could be granted to the new countries only by

separating the coherent shared film history of Yugoslavia into new units and adjusting them

to fit into the new political entities. No doubt, it was a problematic and somewhat arbitrary

act, easily susceptible to disputes and disagreements. Where before we talked of one, albeit

diverse, national cinema, now we distinguish Croatian, Slovene, Bosnian, Macedonian,

Serbian and Montenegrin cinema, and are confronted with difficult decisions about who and

what belongs where.1 The whole rushed undertaking of creating distinct film traditions is

particularly artificial because, carried out as it was at a moment when the borders of national

cinemas were collapsing and giving way to increasingly trans-national film-making, building

on new national cinemas today is a causa perduta.

1 See the respective entries in R Taylor, J Graffy, N Wood and D Iordanova (eds), The BFI Companion to Eastern European and Russian Cinema, London, 2000.




In addition to this peculiar situation, the amount of writing on Yugoslav cinema in

the West is notably scarce. With the exception of the systematic work of Daniel Goulding,

and the extensive but little-seen filmographic work by Ronald Holloway, little has been

published on Yugoslav cinema, one of the most interesting film cultures in Europe.

Nowadays, Yugoslav film is still one of the least-known subjects on the film studies map. At

times when other lesser-known cinemas are coming out of obscurity into the spotlight and

are extensively written about, the treasures of Balkan cinema remain unknown even to

cineastes. The masterpieces of �ivojin Pavlović, �elimir �ilnik, Branko Gapo, Karpo

Godina and many others remain virtually unknown beyond the borders of former

Yugoslavia, and even the works of celebrated veterans such as Du�an Makavejev and Lordan

Zafranović are considered exotic and rarely seen.

Yugoslavia�s break-up in the 1990s has attracted the attention of a large number of

film-makers, both from within the country and internationally, and a number of films, made

both by Yugoslavs and foreign directors, presented a reaction to the conflict. Over 250

feature and documentary films have been made on this subject, thus making the Yugoslav

break-up the event that inspired the most active cinematic output in post-Communist times.

It is a bitter irony, of course, that it took a bloody conflict to attract interest in Yugoslavia

and its cinema. Along with these films, scattered writing on the subject of Yugoslav film, and

particularly on those works dealing with the Yugoslav break-up and its causes, started

appearing in a wide range of journalistic periodicals and academic publications. Little of this

work, however, has been seen in book format, even though proposals for edited collections




on the cinema of Yugoslavia and the Balkans have made the rounds with editors at

established publishing houses.

This volume is thus a first step in compensating for the lack of coherent discussion

of films treating the Yugoslav break-up, inaugurating what may become a series of books. It

brings together writing which addresses recent cinematic works made in response to the

Balkan troubles of the 1990s, approached from various conceptual angles.

In the opening essay, Péter Krasztev critically dissects the work of Emir Kusturica,

Milčo Mančevski, and Gorčin Stojanović, raising issues of ideology and reception, history

and audiences. Writing before the bombing of Belgrade and anticipating that there is no

straightforward answer, he asks who will take the blame for the violence that reigned over

the Yugoslav lands for the past decade (this question has since been answered by the

bombing which, by attributing collective guilt, has opened up another series of questions).

In a piece evolving around a recent British documentary, Andrew James Horton

tracks down the creative development of Emir Kusturica, the celebrated director who has

been no stranger to controversy over the past decade and whose work is discussed in most

of the essays in this collection. An insightful analysis of Srđan Dragojević�s Lepa sela, lepo gore

(Pretty Village, Pretty Flame, 1996) is offered by Igor Krsitć, who brings out the subtly

problematic aspects of the message of this otherwise celebrated film. Benjamin Halligan

offers an interpretative analysis of a series of Yugoslav films within the framework of what

he terms an �aesthetic of chaos� and discusses a general trend toward the blurring of

political subtexts in film depictions of the Bosnian war. The two concluding pieces report on

recent Serbian cinema�Igor Krstić engages in an extensive analysis of Srđan Dragojević�s




Rane (Wounds, 1998) and Andrew James Horton offers an overview of a series of new films,

ranging in quality and style.

The book�s six essays provide a general overview of the issues surrounding Yugoslav

cinema in the 1990s. It is a cinema which managed to keep itself alive in spite of difficult

conditions, and even devastation, in some parts. Let us take a brief look at the condition of

cinematic production across the region.

Serbia is internationally perceived to be the perpetrator of a succession of wars; is a

country which has lived under international economic sanctions for more than five years

now; and was bombed over the controversial Kosovo province in 1999�yet, in a perverse

irony, remains the part of Yugoslavia (in its largest sense) that maintains the most active

cinematic production. (The peculiarities of the film industry here have been described in

short studies by Andrew Horton.)2 The international boycott of Serbia has no doubt

contributed to unifying Serbs, and making them more interested in their own �identity.� This

finds expression in the fact that not just one but all three top-grossing 1998 films in Serbia

were not American blockbusters (as it is the case across the rest of Europe), but films made

by Yugoslav directors�Emir Kusturica�s Gypsy saga Crna mačka, beli macor (Black Cat, White

Cat), Goran Paskaljević�s Bure baruta (Cabaret Balkan / The Powder Keg), and Srđan

Dragojević�s Rane. Of these films, only Rane is officially a Yugoslav production, while Bure

baruta is listed as a co-production with France as a majority partner and the unlikely pair of

2 Editor�s note: the reader should be careful to distinguish Andrew James Horton, the British critic and Culture Editor of Central Europe Review, and Andrew Horton, the American scholar and author.




Greece and Turkey as minority co-producers.3 Kusturica�s film is a French-German

production, with some Yugoslav participation.

This brings us to the issue of Milo�ević�s government interest in filmmaking, a

subject of controversy around earlier films like Podzemlje�bila jednom jedna zemlje

(Underground�Once Upon a Time There was a Country, 1995) and Lepa sela, lepo gore which also

comes up for discussion in the essays in that follow. This government�s involvement is not

as easy to tackle as it seems: while there is plenty of evidence of government interference in

the work of media, with film it is not a straightforward case of a Communist-type direct

dictate over film-making.

If one compares interviews given abroad and at home, directors such as Dragojević

and Paskaljević have not made the answer to the question on government control any easier:

while giving clear indications abroad that they have been deprived of government support

and have been turned into personae non grata, at home they have maintained high-profile

presences both in the dissident and in the mainstream media (something which would barely

be possible in a truly totalitarian state). Paradoxically, by not reporting stories of government

control, Kusturica seems to have been the most forthcoming one; maybe because as a

survivor of the noisy controversy surrounding Podzemlje he has learned that, government

support or interference, it does not really matter.4

3 See Bure Baruta�s page on the Eurimages subsite, part of the bilingual The Europe of Cultural Cooperation

site. 4 Dina Iordanova �Kusturica�s Underground: Historical Allegory or Propaganda,� Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television , Vol l9, No. l (March l999), pp 69-86.

http://culture.coe.fr/Eurimages/100 films/bure baruta.htm




The work of these three directors has enjoyed the most attention internationally. But

all three of them currently live beyond the borders of former Yugoslavia. Others, however,

stayed in Serbia and are still there. Some members of the former Prague Group, for example,

are stationed in Belgrade, such as: Srđan Karanović, the director of Virgina, 1991, who is

currently working in the documentary field; Goran Marković, Urnebesna tragedija (Burlesque

Tragedy, 1995); and Milo� Radivojević Ni na nebu ni na zemlji (Between Heaven and Earth, 1994).

Ljubi�a Samard�ić, the famous comedian turned producer (running one of the most active

companies, Cinema Dizajn), recently made his directorial debut with Nebeska udica (Sky

Hook, 1999), a melodrama set amidst the ruins of the Belgrade bombing of 1999. Gorčin

Stojanović, a member of the younger generation who started in theater, has made two

features: the first, Ubistvo s predumi�ljajem (Premeditated Murder, 1995), subtly exploring the clash

of past and present; the second, Str�ljen (Hornet, 1998), a film dangerously jingoistic in its

representation of the Albanian minority.

There is a burgeoning documentary filmmaking which ranges from the satires made

by veterans such as �elimir �ilnik, who directed Tito po drugi put medju srbima (Tito Among the

Serbs of a Second Time, 1993) and Dupe od mramora (Marble Ass, 1995), to the bleak and

demoralized reality found in the work of Janko Baljak, the director of Vidimo se u citulji (The

Crime that Changed Serbia, 1995) and Mladen Maticević, and Ivan Markov Geto (Ghetto, 1995).

In Sarajevo, as noted by Rada �e�ić, the post-war landscape is being rented to various

filming crews, as already seen in the politically correct flop meant to be a blockbuster

Welcome to Sarajevo (Michael Winterbottom, 1996). The only feature made here for the decade

was Ademir Kenović�s Savr�eni krug (Perfect Circle, 1997), scripted by celebrated local poet, and




Kusturica�s earlier scriptwriter, Abdulah Sidran, a film marked by overt sentimentality which

was seen at festivals but never picked up for distribution. Kenović is the creative leader of

SaGA, a group of filmmakers who were most active during the siege and who are

responsible for remarkable and rarely seen footage documenting the war. Documentary

production is still very active�in 1998, for example, Haris Pa�ović�s Greta and Bato Čengić�s

Mona Lisa u Sarajevu (Mona Lisa from Sarajevo) were acclaimed at international festivals�and

lately there is a new generation of young filmmakers, mostly working on shorts. Nonetheless,

still more films are made about Sarajevo by outsiders than by locals. Branko Lustig, the

Hollywood-based and Croatian-born producer of Schindler�s List, is said to be sponsoring a

forthcoming blockbuster called Sarajevo, scheduled to be directed by the partisan-saga

veteran Veljko Bulajić.

Due to its geographic location, Croatia inherited the site of the former pan-Yugoslav

film festival in Pula, which has since turned into a national film festival where annual film

production is showcased. Only a handful of the films shown here have been seen

internationally, however. With the exception of Jakov Sedlar�s Gospa (Madonna, 1993) which

was distributed in the West via a Catholic network, the only two films which were seen on a

wider basis were the political comedies of young director Vinko Bre�an�Kako je počeo rat na

mom otoku (How the War Started on My Little Island, 1996) and Mar�al (Marshal Tito�s Ghost,

2000).

Persisting in their nation�s desire to distance itself from the whole bloody Yugoslav

break-up, Slovenian filmmakers seem to be preoccupied with a variety of other issues, and

none of the films produced here deal directly with the experiences and traumas of the war.




The documentary of Ljubljana-based American Michael Benson Prerokbe ognja (Predictions of

Fire, 1995) about the artistic movement Neue Slovenische Kunst and the group Laibach was the

only one to venture into direct exploration of the issues of conflict. Nonetheless, many

recent Slovenian films move thematically around questions of historical legacies and

positioning within Europe, thus touching on the indirect implications of the war�Outsider,

Andrej Ko�ak, 1997; Rusko meso (Russian Flesh, Lukas Nola, 1998); V leru (Idle Running, Janez

Burger, 1999).

Macedonia, a country whose entire film production consists of about 50 feature

titles, came onto the spotlight with the celebrated film by Milčo Mančevski Pred do�dot (Before

the Rain, 1994).5 After several years in failed attempts to make another film, Mančevski is

now working on a new internationally financed project, Dust, a film which will cut across

space and time to present yet another inverted idea of history. The plot evolves between

present-day New York and Macedonia from the times of the Ilinden uprising of 1903. It is

not by chance that his work attracted the attention of film and history theorist Robert A

Rosenstone, who organized a conference about Pred do�dot and recently edited a special

journal issue devoted to the film. Besides Mančevski�s work, the decade of Macedonian

cinema also saw some other successful releases, such as Stole Popov�s Gypsy Magic (1997),

and the sentimental story of inter-ethic love Preku ezeru (Across the Lake, 1998), a debut

feature of Antonio Mitrikeski.

5 For more information on Macedonian cinema, see the Cinematheque of Macedonia site.

http://www.makedonija.at/kinoteka




Then, there is the growing number of dispersed Yugoslavs working in diaspora.

These include literary figures such as Dubravka Ugre�ić, Slavenka Drakulić, and Aleksandar

Hemon, performance artists such as Marina Abramović, as well as film directors whose work

is known internationally�Du�an Makavejev, the globe-trotting doyen of Yugoslav émigré

directors, but also Rajko Grlić in the US, and Lordan Zafranović in Prague. From the

younger generation of filmmakers, Berlin-based Zoran Solomun was one of the first to track

down the emigration dimension of the Bosnian crisis in Müde Weggefarten (Tired Companions,

Germany, 1995), a topic tackled later on by Vienna-based Goran Rebić in Yugofilm (Austria,

1998), by London-based Jasmin Dizdar in Beautiful People (UK, 1999) and by Vancouver-

based Davor Marjanović in My Father�s Angel (Canada, 1999).6 And, of course, there is the ill-

positioned albeit best-distributed film of Predrag �Gaga� Antonijević Saviour (USA, 1997),

which besides its questionable and superficial treatment of many issues, grossly copies from

the largely unseen but much admired work of Zafranović, Okupacija u 26 slika (Occupation in

26 Pictures, 1978), a classic of Yugoslav cinema.7

The cinematic world of former Yugoslavia today seems to be almost entirely

dominated by men, thus confirming the allegations of the profoundly macho character of

Yugoslav culture made by political scientist Sabrina Ramet or feminist Beverly Allen. Of

course, there are talented actresses like Mirjana Joković (Podzemlje and Bure baruta, Str�ljen)

and Branka Katić (Ubistvo s predumi�ljamem and Crna mačka, beli macor), but the names of

female directors like Gordana Bo�kov Budenje proleća (The Awakening of Spring, 1993) or

6 For more information on Beautiful People, see the film�s w ebsite. 7 Daniel Goulding, Occupation in 26 Pictures, Flicks Books, Trow bridge, 1998.

http://www.beautifulpeoplethefilm.com/




Mirjana Vukomanović Tri letnja dana (Three Summer Days, 1997) are barely known beyond the

borders of Serbia, and the work of Sarajevan documentarian Vesna Ljubić (Ecce Homo, 1992-

1994) and young Bosnian Jasmila Zbanić is seen mostly at specialized festivals.8

The most interesting productions from this part of the world are being showcased at

two international venues - the annual Balkan Survey takes place at the Thessaloniki

International Film Festivalin November of each year.9 It was here where many of the films

talked about in this volume were first seen. A lesser-known venue are the annual January

Alpe-Adria Film Meetings in Trieste. The Istanbul Film Festival, taking place in April, has

also developed a permanent Balkan focus.10 In 2000, the Venice biennale held an extensive

panorama of Balkan cinema, curated by veteran critic Sergio Grmek Germani, in close

collaboration with Du�an Makavejev.

Wrapping up the decade, it is very likely that the year 2000 will mark the end of the

series of films that dealt with the painful and traumatic Yugoslav break-up. The directors

responsible for the most important of these films now seem to have switched not only to

other geographical but also to other thematical dimensions. Emir Kusturica of Underground

(1995) established himself in France, starred in Patrice Leconte�s La veuve de Saint-Pierre (The

Widow of Saint-Pierre, 2000) alongside Juliette Binoche and recently toured various jazz

festivals with his band, No Smoking. His next project will be an adaptation of D M

Thomas�s The White Hotel (1981). This shattering novel (which begins as an erotic piece and

8 A sample of Jasmila Zbanić�s w ork can be seen at the surival-art.org w ebsite. 9 See the festival w ebsite. 10 See the festival w ebsite.

http://www.survival-art.org/artists/sarajevo/jasmila.html

http://www.filmfestival.gr/

http://www.istfest.org/




then evolves into a psychoanalytical study of hysteria and ends up as a critique of the

limitations of psychoanalysis when faced with the mighty flows of historical violence in the

massacre of Babiy Yar), will be filmed from a script by the late Dennis Potter. One of

Fellini�s regular cameramen has been enlisted for this entirely Western-produced project.

Srđan Dragojević (Lepa sela, lepo gore and Rane) left Belgrade at just about the time of

the bombing over Kosovo started and landed in New York. He has since moved to Los

Angeles, where he is engaged in pre-production for a Miramax-supported movie. He has, for

now, vowed not to return to the explosive topic of Yugoslavia.

Goran Paskaljević, the director of Tuđa Amerika (Someone Else�s America, 1995) and

Bure baruta, has lived in Paris since the early 1990s and is at the time of writing shooting his

new film (an Italian, Irish, French and British co-production) on location in Mexico.11

Life goes on, and the new films of these directors, as well as of those others whom I

mentioned here, are eagerly anticipated. One thing is certain�not only in regard to former

Yugoslavia, but in European cinema at large, the 1990s will be remembered with the films

about the Balkans conflicts and traumas.

Dina Iordanova

11 For more details on Goran Paskaljević, see the director�s official w ebsite.

http://www.paskaljevic.com/

mailto:[email protected]




Bibliography Goulding, Daniel J, Liberated Cinema: The Yugoslav Experience, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1988. Goulding, Daniel, Occupation in 26 Pictures, Trowbridge, Flicks Books, 1998. (purchase from Amazon.co.uk) Grbić, Bogdan, Gabriel Loidot and Rossen Milev (Hrsgs), Die Siebte Kunst auf dem Pulverfass. Balkan Film. Graz, Edition Blimp, 1995. Holloway, Ronald. Slovenian Film. Slovenian Post-War Cinema, 1945-1985, Berlin, Kino. Special Issue 1985 with Cleveland Cinematheque. Holloway, Ronald. Macedonian Film. A History of Macedonian Cinema, 1905-1996, Berlin, Kino. Special Issue/1996 with Cinematheque of Macedonia.. Horton, Andrew, �Only Crooks Can Get Ahead: Post-Yugoslav Cinema/TV/Video in the 1990s� in Ramet, Sabrina P and Ljubi�a S Adamović (eds), Beyond Yugoslavia. Politics, Economics and Culture in a Shattered Community, Boulder, CO, Westview Press, 1995. pp. 413-431. (purchase from Amazon.com), (purchase from Amazon.co.uk) Iordanova, Dina, �Kusturica�s Underground: Historical Allegory or Propaganda.� Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television. Vol l9, No. l (March l999), pp69-86. Taylor, Richard, Julian Graffy, Nancy Wood, and Dina Iordanova, The BFI Companion to Eastern European and Russian Cinema, London: British Film Institute, 2000. (purchase from Amazon.co.uk) Rosenstone, Robert (ed), special issue on Mančevski�s Pred do�dot, Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice, Volume 4, Number 2, Summer 2000. Contributors: Robert A. Rosenstone, Milčo Mančevski, Victor A. Friedman, Dina Iordanova, Robert Burgoyne, Ian Christie, Eric Tängerstad. �e�ić, Rada. �Bosnia and Herzegovina,� Variety International Yearbook 1999, pp 101-107. (purchase from Amazon.co.uk)

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0948911646/centraleuroperev

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0813379539/centraleuropeanr


http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/085170753X/centraleuroperev




Who Will Take the Blame?

How to make an audience grateful for a family massacre *

Péter Krasztev

* Originally published as �Who Will Take the Blame?� in Central Europe Review, Vol 1, 1999, No 3.




The unsavable

By a lucky chance, I managed to get into the Belgrade premiere of the Predrag

�Gaga� Antonijević film Spasitelj (The Saviour, 1998), a Serb-American co-production. Not a

single seat was left empty in the main hall of the Sava Centar which seats four thousand. The

local political and intellectual elites were showing off their English and French outfits and, in

the rows before me, well-known war criminals were clutching their wives� hands in

excitement.

The story starts in Paris. An American diplomat is preparing for a dinner out with his

wife and young child when an American officer appears and tells him confidentially that he

has found out about plans of a terrorist attack by Muslim fundamentalists�could they talk

urgently? They have barely left the restaurant when a mighty bang is heard, the building

collapses, the diplomat rushes back and, amidst the rubble, finds his wife and child lying in

blood. In the next scene he is sitting next to the coffin of his beloved and, distraught with

grief, swears a terrible vengeance. He rushes into the street, straight into the first Muslim

prayer house that he sees and massacres the Muslims who are praying there.

The tension which had held the viewers spellbound was suddenly released, and the

select audience burst out cheering and applauding frantically. Even though I had known




from the start that I was not sitting among rebellious Belgrade students or pacifist

intellectuals, the experience was horrifying. But to assume that I had spent two moderately

exciting hours breathing the same air with four thousand potential mass murderers would be

neither professional nor humane, even in retrospect.

At the press conference following the premiere, Dennis Quaid, who played the

diplomat, told us in a slightly uneasy manner that he had been surprised by the audience's

reaction, but then reminded himself that his people gave way to similar emotions whenever

they were shown the homes of indigenous Americans on fire.

Reference to universal human stupidity, however, cannot satisfactorily explain how a

propaganda mechanism could create such an entirely spontaneous and uniformly subhuman

response to a dramatic feature. The family massacre as a cliché has proven a reliable trigger

from Taiwan to Hollywood�such a scene should wake the vengeful monster in even the

meekest of viewers. But this was something different. What I saw was the ultimate aim of

persistent and aggressive brainwashing, the creation of a �grateful� (ie bad) audience.

Metaphors charged with the suitable meanings �in this case the metaphor of the family� can

be thrown among such a responsive audience at any time and in any context and will yield a

predictable explosion. No ideologue could wish for more than that.

Sublime sufferings of an ideologue

Despite how it may appear on first glance, the post-Yugoslav ideologue of our time

is not in an easy position as he must elaborate a rhetoric which is effective in three directions




simultaneously. Firstly, the rhetoric of the present-day film-maker / ideologue must act to

create the above-mentioned �grateful� audience. In other words, the rhetoric must soothe

society into accepting without qualm or query any sort of war crime or economic crime.

Secondly, it must be aware that it determines, to a great extent, future�s image of the present.

This means that the criminals of the present day must also be made immune to reproach or

investigation on a historical scale. Finally, it must manipulate external observers, at least to

such a degree that they become hesitant in uttering their disparaging judgements.

The first challenge was taken up quite easily. In 1994, Renata Salecl systematically

analysed the main sources from which the elements of the new mythology �with which the

Serbian audience was meant to be anaesthetised� were drawn. According to her analysis, the

new ideology uses an indiscriminate mixture of traditional Stalinism, proto-fascist right-wing

populism, etatism, the mythologising of nationalism, bourgeois liberalism and patriarchal

metaphor.12 This relatively simple task was accomplished by through state-controlled media,

initially creating the appearance of free competition which was later replaced by outright

dictatorial means.

The brainwashing of contemporaries is similarly easy, but the much more challenging

task is the invention of an historical narrative which can help Serbian posterity to sublimate

the crimes of the 1990s and which can avert all the frustrations that are predictably towering

on the horizon. At the same time, this historical narrative needs to offer Western analysts a

metaphor which they can substitute for the real history that took place and might even divert

12 Renata Salecl, The Spoils of Freedom: Psychoanalysis and Feminism After the Fall of Socialism, New York-London, 1994, p 64.




historians at a later stage. This delicate task could not be entrusted to the domestic media; it

could be made possible only through some sort of aesthetic missile that is rapid and has

massive range. This is what filmmaking offered and this is why no one ever begrudged it the

millions it cost, even in the years of the worst poverty.

The Yugoslav ideologue of our time has found the obvious solution�he tries to play

up the universal human stupidity to which we have already alluded. In his excellent essay

�Europe in the Balkan Mirror,� Jacques Rupnik gives ample consideration to the question

we have just outlined and comes to the conclusion that the West has only tried to interpret

the events of the Yugoslav region according to two code systems, both of which are

erroneous.13

One of these is the cliché of belated modernisation, according to which we may

view what is taking place in Yugoslavia as the same as what happened in other Eastern

European countries at the time of the emergence of nation states. The only difference is

that, for historical reasons, the ideas of the German Enlightenment reached Yugoslavia after

a considerable delay. This line of interpretation is exploited mainly by people who think of

themselves as among the Slovenian and Croatian �national elite.� They argue that their

declarations of independence were the result of a long and torturous struggle by their people.

Accordingly, the Yugoslav wars were not the overture but the final chord of a fight for

independence, meaning that they cannot represent a historical reference point of any

importance. Consequently, in these two countries, no significant film about the war was ever

produced, with the rare exception of Croatian director Vinko Bre�an�s Kako je počeo rat na

13 Jacques Rupnik, �Europa in Balkanspiegel,� Lettre International, 1998. No 42, pp 96-97.

http://www.lettre.de/lettre/heft42.htm




mome otoku (How the War Started on My Island, 1996), but this comedy does not bear any

ideological ballast.

According to the other Western code of interpretation that Rupnik introduces, what

we are facing is the irrational outburst of a tribal hostility that had been long suppressed in

the Balkans. Such a representation of the situation has supplied the Serbian and, to a lesser

extent the Macedonian, propaganda industry with an inexhaustible wealth of arguments and

metaphors�the very raw material for which movies are an excellent vehicle. The basic

argument is a reiteration of the central tenet of that dubious masterpiece of political theory,

Samuel Huntington�s The Clash of Civilizations. In the Balkans, the argument goes, people live

in a different world, ruled by different legal, economic and historical necessities. Irrational

violence is an elemental part of everyday life, something the thesis holds that obersvers from

the outside world will never understand. It is best, then, that they leave the local peoples

alone. The paradox in this statement is that the �unfathomability,� �unutterability� and

�mystery of the place� which was originally included in the tribal, irrational explanation is

then reinforced by those who are being observed, then referred back to the source where

this nonsense was initially invented for purposes of self-reassurance.

It is within this tribal-irrational-patriarchal context that the metaphor of the family

creates its own semantic field and exercises its manipulative power.

It is surprising but true that the family metaphor hardly ever surfaces in a pure form

within the political rhetoric of the era before the emergence of the first Yugoslav state. In

1867, when the leaders of the Croatian National Party agreed with the Serbian government

about the necessity of creating a joint state, allusions were made to the historical kinship of




the peoples inhabiting the region. But on this occasion the formula declared that the

"Southern Slavic tribes" needed to be united. The country as a family became a more

widespread theme under Tito. It was he who spoke about �brotherhood and unity� (bratsvo i

jedinstvo), about a common Yugoslav identity and who always tried to suggest that he was the

head of this family, the father, tacitly appointing himself as the paterfamilias of the Yugoslav

nation. Not all East European dictators dared to overtly assume the title of the Father of the

Nation in the manner of Kemal Atatürk, who boasted in a similar vein of having created the

Turkish nation.

The central family metaphor of the era of �peaceful socialism� in Yugoslavia was

used by director Emir Kusturica in his film Otac na slu�benom putu (When Father was away on

Business, 1985) Under the conditions of totalitarian dictatorship the family was only point of

certainty, the hinterland to which the humiliated and persecuted individual could retreat.

The man of our time creates the epoch

Kusturica has always been a man of his times, then as now. Podzemlje�bila jednom

jedna zemlje (Underground�Once Upon a Time There Was a Country, 1995), a film made with

massive state subsidies, is a veritable encyclopaedia of manipulation techniques. Even so, it

was awarded Palme d�Or at Cannes, fulfilling the most daring dreams of Belgrade

ideologues: the West found narcissistic pleasure in rewarding the movie for reflecting all the

typical Western misconceptions. Podzemlje proved to be the source of an inexhaustible

historical metaphor, simultaneously exposing the supposed anti-Serbian manipulations of




other nationalities (in Renata Salecl�s terminology this amounts to mythologising of

nationalism), Communist ideology (bourgeois liberalism), the loss of traditional values (the

patriarchal metaphor) and the corruption of the West (traditional Stalinism). In other words,

everyone received a spectacular chastisement, yet all parties seemed very satisfied with the

end product.

Podzemlje is another film in which �history at large� is brought closer to the viewer

through a family, more precisely by a love triangle simulating a family. In the story, which

begins during the Second World War, two southern macho types fight for the heart of the

character Natalia. They are embodiments of two common stereotypes of Communist

resistance fighters. One is Crni, the sucker with a pure heart, who has true faith in the ideal

and is thus easily manipulated, while the other is Marko, the intellectual, careerist, money-

minded manipulator who seems never to lose in any situation.

In accordance with the patriarchal stereotypes, women are never seen as anything

other than a means to satisfy the possessive greed of men, a mere tool in any given

situation� and even ready to �collaborate� with a Nazi officer. Natalia has no principles

and, instead, is subservient to the intentions and designs of the two men, even though all she

dreams about throughout the film is a conventional, peaceful family life. Within the context

of the film, both men have a �claim� on this woman�each considers her to be �his� wife.

The family metaphor encoded in the film is not difficult to decipher. In Kusturica�s

vision the history of Yugoslavia since the war has been nothing but lies, false consciousness

and a simulation of reality. Nothing is genuine, similarly to the marriages of the characters, in

which we never find out which is the real husband, nor is it ever decided which is the real




world�the underground one or the one on the surface. The female figure could represent

the idea of Yugoslavism itself, which everyone wishes to possess.

In fact, both of the rival parties end up frustrated�Crni because during the war he

lost his fertility, and Marko because he hypocritically supports an appearance of things which

is incompatible with fatherhood. Since one is incapable and the other is unworthy of

fatherhood, there is no one to perpetuate or even maintain the patriarchal order. Although

Crni had a son by his wife before the war, the boy was shot from a helicopter by people

whom Crni believed to be fascists. In the scene following the son�s death, we see Crni as a

Četnik leader, burning Bosnian villages believed to be fascist and issuing execution orders

for everybody, including Marko and Natalia.

All the film�s elements are metaphorical in nature�the woman, both male figures,

the family, the space and time of the film, even sin itself is a metaphor, meaning that nothing

is real:Men and women are only the vehicles for concepts; the family is unreal since it

remains childless; time and space are those of the Balkans (ie: they exist only in a symbolic

sense; and, most importantly, sin is not real as it has no protagonist who could be blamed for

it. Everything is the result of the accursed duplicity and duality of this Balkan world, of the

fact that one nation cannot have two fathers. The only culprit in the massive destruction is

sinister, unfortunate history, which keeps haunting the region, bringing out inhabitants� urge

to kill. The people of this area yearn for nothing other than to escape from the shadow

world of this simulation and to experience the �real thing.� We shall return later to exactly

what Kusturica considers this real thing to be.




In a witty and spirited lecture, historian and War Minister John Keegan declared that

Winston Churchill defined the image of the Second World War to be used by post-war

Anglo-Saxon historians in a single, famous sentence: �In war, resolution; in defeat, defiance;

in victory, magnanimity; in peace, good will.�14 The first statement about the Yugoslav war

was uttered by Kusturica, in the language of film.

In his film Ubistvo s predumi�ljamem (Premeditated Murder, 1994), Gorčin Stojanović

echoes Kusturica�s thesis about historical lies using devices which are slightly less overtly

manipulative, drawing on the story of two family tragedies. In one, he tells the history of the

love between a young woman from Belgrade who belongs to the opposition and a Serbian

fighter from the Krajina who has returned wounded from the front. The woman had been

deserted by her parents, while the man�s parents had been killed by Croats. The woman

spends her time reconstructing her grandmother�s life-story from after the Second World

War, and the grandmother�s story provides the other thread for the drama. Her rich

bourgeois family had been impoverished by the Communists, but this did not stop her from

falling in love with a Communist Party officer, thus becoming unfaithful to her previous

lover�her own foster brother. The tension of the triangle is resolved when the foster

brother shoots the Communist officer and the audience is left guessing who the y oung

woman�s true grandfather was.

The meaning of family history as a metaphor is not very different here than in

Kusturica�s version�a �system conceived in sin� can only come to a sinful end. There is no

14 John Keegan, �Do We Need a New History of the Second World War?� in Stig Ekman and Nils Edling (eds) War Experience, Self-Image and National Identity: The Second World War as Myth and History, 1997, p 82.




hope for family bliss since too much tension accumulated over the previous decades for the

conflict to have any rational resolution. The son�s vengefulness proves stronger than the

positive emotions of the film. Even though, toward the, end he relieves himself by

screaming �I know that war is a load of crap,� he goes back to the front, only to be carried

home dead to Belgrade. As with the post-Second World War subplot, this story ends in

death. Love cannot be fulfilled and it is impossible for a family to emerge�but history

returns and will explain the present.

Macedonian variations

The family metaphor has also been an inspiration for several Macedonian filmmakers

in the last few years. Milčo Mančevski�s hugely successful movie, Pred do�dot (Before the Rain,

1994), is the most evident example of the use of the irrational tribal cliche. The recurring

wave of violence is presented by the director as a natural catastrophe which strikes the

people of the region regardless of human will. At the beginning of the story (which in this

case does not coincide with the beginning of the film) a lusty, married shepherd sets eyes on

a young Albanian girl. He tries to rape her, at which point she unhesitatingly stabs him with a

pitchfork. It is here that the usual Balkan vendetta narrative begins, the essence of which is

that since the disintegration of Yugoslavia, Albanians and Macedonians have become

culturally incompatible. Returning elements are the false or mythical consciousness of the

characters, the destructive practices of half-witted individuals reared on Partisan films and

the accumulated historical tension which, according to the nature of things, is bound to

resurface some time or another.




The director includes the story of two failures to establish a family, in order to make

palpable what might be called �the metaphysics of history.� The hero, Aleksandar, is a well-

known photographer returning from England. Sixteen years earlier, he had wanted to marry

his Albanian lover, at a time when this was still possible. The woman pays her one-time lover

a secret night visit and, at the same time, asks him to save her daughter, who is none other

than the murderer of the rapist shepherd�who also happens to be the photographer�s

cousin. Aleksandar fetches the young girl the next morning, but her relatives shoot him. The

girl flees to a monastery, finding refuge in the cell of a young monk who turns out to be

Aleksandar�s nephew. In one night they fall in love with each other, the monk smuggles the

girl out of the monastery and they are busy planning their future life together when the girl�s

Albanian relatives appear and shoot the girl. Illusions disappear. There is no chance for

family reunion since time runs its mythological circles and events recur in the same way as

they happened decades ago. The family as a political metaphor interprets the present with

the touch of metaphysics.

A peculiar interpretation of the metaphor of the family can be detected in

Samounistuvanje (Self-destruction, 1996), another Macedonian film (albeit made by a Turkish

director working in Skopje, Erbil Altanay). The technical standards of execution in

Samounistuvanje parallel, in places, those of an average Czech or Hungarian TV soap opera.

The main character is a taxi driver with an inherently aggressive personality. He is not only

unfaithful to his wife on a regular basis, but also beats her and, at one point, betrays his

benefactors for money. All the while he is dripping with nostalgia for the old Yugoslavia,




where he could at least make ends meet, since neither the multi-party system, nor the nation

state, nor freedom can be exchanged for bread.

The cabby is merciless, raping his son�s virgin girlfriend who, consequently, becomes

pregnant. Carried along by the same impulse, he also tries to rape his own wife but the son

can no longer watch this passively�he hits his father and cripples him for life. The story

ends on an unexpectedly idyllic note�the family brings up the baby, the son drives the

father�s cab and makes a more than decent living out of it and order is restored. The viewer

finds out that you can make your fortune under the new freedom, all we need are the

appropriate people to first get rid of the fathers, then forgive their sins while, of course,

bearing the consequences of these sins. With their hard working perseverance, this youthful

generation can create an earthly paradise in this small, yet viable, nation state.

Return to the Kingdom of Heaven

Kusturica himself also has a vision of an earthly paradise. As noted earlier, Jacques

Rupnik benevolently misunderstands the closing sequence of Podzemlje. He believes that the

image of the land (the former Yugoslavia) �detaching itself from the continent while its

inhabitants continue to sing and dance frenetically� to be an �arresting metaphor for the

Balkan predicament today: confronted with the prospect of drift and marginalisation or

overcoming the present crisis and creating the conditions for a �return to Europe�.�

In fact, the island is the scene of the wedding of a resurrected family in the wider

sense: Marko officially marries Natalia, Crni wins his wife�s forgiveness and their common




son is present, together with all the other people who had been swept away by the chaos of

different wars during the film. This is the island of happiness, the �Yugoslavia of ideas� as

opposed to the �shadow� (underground) Yugoslavia, which is false and full of pretence, the

heaven in which, at last, everything is real. It is that �real thing� which every mortal down

below craves. For this to come to pass, it was necessary to become detached from the

external world, since it is only the closest family (ie the nation state) in which we can be at

home. Here, nobody can explode the family; we can be our own grateful audience.

While the happy island slowly floats away and we have fun, the blame is taken by

Plato, Huntington, Baudrillard, the Manichean Bogumils, Rudolf Steiner and others whose

metaphors about the bipolarity of the world are so frequently quoted and transformed into

entertaining images by contemporary Yugoslav directors.

Peter Krasztev (translated by Orsolya Frank)





Bibliography Huntington, Samuel P, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, New York, 1996. (purchase from Amazon.com), (purchase from Amazon.co.uk) Keegan, John, �Do We Need a New History of the Second World War?� in: Stig Ekman and Nils Edling (eds) War Experience, Self-Image and National Identity: The Second World War as Myth and History, 1997. Rupnik Jacques, �Europa in Balkanspiegel,� in: Lettre International, 1998/42. Salecl, Renata, The Spoils of Freedom: Psychoanalysis and Feminism After the Fall of Socialism, New York-London, 1994. (purchase from Amazon.com), (purchase from Amazon.co.uk)



http://www.lettre.de/lettre/heft42.htm

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/041507357X/centraleuropeanr

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0415073588/centraleuroper




Critical Mush

The South Bank Show gives Emir Kusturica an easy ride *

Andrew James Horton

* This article was originally published as �Critical Mush� in Central Europe Review, Vol 2, 2000, No 14.

http://www.ce-review.org/00/14/kinoeye14_horton.html




Emir Kusturica, the Sarajevo-born film director, has in his career experienced the

extremes of adulation and moral outrage. Podzemlje�bila jednom jedna zemlje (Underground�

Once Upon a Time There Was a Country, 1995), his most famous film, won him both a Palme

d�Or at Cannes and accusations of spreading Serbian nationalist propaganda.

As a result, a British documentary on this most topical and controversial of directors,

made for the renowned TV arts programme The South Bank Show and broadcast on ITV

(Britain�s independent television network) on 12 March 2000, had much of interest to

discuss and analyse.15 To help them to get to the root of the matter, the makers had

unrivalled access to Kusturica in that much of the hour-long programme, directed by Gerald

Fox, was made up of interviews with the director. This approach allowed the audience to

gain an interesting insight into Kusturica�s influences as a director and the rationale behind a

few of his films.

However, the one-sided nature of the programme�the interviewer�s questions were

edited out leaving just the interviewee�s uninterrupted words�meant that not only were

serious questions left unanswered by the programme, but they were never actually asked.

15 In the US, The South Bank Show is broadcast on Bravo.




Kusturica, therefore, had the perfect opportunity to defend his art without the audience

being given the case against it.

Gypsy king

In most cases, documentaries take a chronological approach in explaining a director�s

story. But The South Bank Show chose a more thematic approach, dealing with the relatively

uncontroversial Gypsy films first, before moving onto the trickier topics of his forays into

politics and history. Interspersed throughout were clips of Kusturica playing rhythm guitar

with his band, No Smoking, whilst puffing away at a cigar in staunch defiance of the

ensemble�s name.

In both his political and his Gypsy films, the director�s film-making style has drawn

heavily on his childhood in a sprawling near-shanty-town of a suburb at the edge of multi-

ethnic Sarajevo. He himself is a Muslim by birth. Despite the poverty, Kusturica considers

himself lucky to have grown up among the Roma. In the documentary, he said it enabled

him to experience the freedom they have in their lives:

they started drinking earlier than us, they started sleeping with girls earlier

than we did. So, every spiritual process that every man has to go through

they had instantly and with no problems.

Kusturica denied, though, that he was romanticising the harsh conditions that the Roma

often have to endure, a frequent criticism of his films.

As well as training an eye for the minutiae of human behaviour, these early

experiences taught him that naturalism had its limits in film, a realisation that has led him to




the dense magic realism that has permeated the most controversial of his films. Of interest in

this light is the director�s admiration for French poetic realism, and particularly the

�elegance� and �playful ground� found in Jean Renoir�s La règle du jeu (The Rules of the Game,

1939). Later, Kusturica compared himself to Hieronymous Bosch in his wish to control

detail.

Kusturica�s fame started in 1981 with Sjećas li se Dolly Bell? (Do You Remember Dolly

Bell?), which won both a Golden Lion and the FIPRESCI Award at Venice for its depiction

of Sarajevo life on the breadline. With the kudos these prestigious awards gained him, he was

able to make a film on a politically sensitive topic, Otac na slu�benom putu (When Father Was

Away on Business, 1985). The film�s title comes from the euphemism used by mothers to

explain to the children where their dad was when he was locked away as a political prisoner,

and the plot was indirectly inspired by Kusturica�s own life, as many of his father�s friends

were jailed for not supporting Tito when the decisive split with Stalin came in 1948. The

political element is only one side of the film, though, and the painful love story goes, as

Kusturica acknowledged in the documentary, �deeply into the substance of human life.� It

was even more successful than his debut, earning the director his first Palme d�Or at Cannes.

Otac na slu�benom putu also saw Kusturica experiment with magic realism for the first

time, allowing one of his characters to fly�another feature that would become increasingly

important in his imagery. As Kusturica himself explains, flight represents the symbolic

overcoming of gravity and freedom of the soul.

Kusturica�s reputation increased with Dom za ve�anje (Time of the Gypsies, 1989), which

allowed him to vent his imagination more fully. Some audiences, however, started to sense




an increasing loss of control over the overall story, with too much attention paid to imagistic

detail.

A dream flops

This trend was confirmed in Arizona Dream (1993), the first (and so far the only)

Kusturica film to be directed and set in the United States. Made while teaching at Columbia

University, Arizona Dream was Kusturica�s own interpretation of what the American dream

has become. Although he was able to draw on big names such as Johnny Depp, Jerry Lewis

and Faye Dunaway in the cast list, the film was a critical disaster. Overly long, rambling,

pretentious and failing to analyse America in any meaningful way, the film was felt by many

to illustrate that Kusturica was now a director with an ego out of control.

No mention of this was made in the documentary, although Kusturica did put his

side of the story across, explaining that, faced with a decision between making films in his

style or yielding to the pressure to make marketable hits, he reacted by becoming even more

personal than in his previous films.

But the controversy around the director really heated up with his next film, the

notorious Podzemlje, his attempt to portray the tragic history of his country. Having returned

to a war-torn Yugoslavia from his time teaching at Columbia, Kusturica was invited to make

a film explaining the background to the war. He thus set about adapting a 20-year-old play

by Du�an Kovečević, a process which involved stripping it of all but its most basic plot

elements.




The first cut of the film was a staggering 5 hours and 12 minutes (this full version of

the film is nevertheless occasionally shown), and the studio gingerly persuaded Kusturica to

re-edit the film to knock a couple of hours off it. Even now, in its three-hour form, its most

enthusiastic defenders agree that it is still too long and could do with an extra half hour

removed from the middle.

50 Years of History

The story concerns two loveable rogues, Crni (translatable as �Blacky,� and played by

Lazar Ristovski) and Marko (Miki Manojlović). When World War II comes, the two staunch

patriots join the resistance to win back their country and�more importantly�the women

they both love from the clutches of the Germans. Forced into hiding, the two carry on their

resistance by manufacturing rifles. When the war ends, Marko is somewhat reluctant to give

up his armaments factory, and so he convinces the people hiding in his cellar that the war is

still continuing. Marko sells the guns they produce for his own profit.

Meanwhile, Marko is also getting ahead in the Communist Party, using his war-time

resistance credentials to help him up the ladder. This is not the only duplicity he engages in,

as he is also married to Natalija in his above-ground existence without Crni knowing. By the

time the characters emerge from their cellar, the Bosnian war has started and the deception

is complete.

The South Bank Show merely pointed out that the film is �controversial� and that it

made him persona non grata in his home town. The only other thing it chose to say on the




subject was that it won Kusturica his second Palme d�Or: a rather selective presentation of

the arguments raging over the film.

Supporters maintain that it is a complex film, working on many levels. They point

out the director�s acute awareness of the contradictions of Yugoslavia�s troubled history and

argue that the film satirises the dishonesty and opportunism of the warmongers. One critic,

mindful of both the comedy and tragedy of the film, describes it as being �as if The Marx

Brothers had been enlisted to tell us the history of man�s inhumanity to man.� 16

Detractors have labelled the film pro-Milo�ević, pointing out that it presents the

Balkans as some great arena of madness, in which an ingrained mentality makes violence

inevitable and unstoppable. This, critics say, puts Kusturica in line with Serbian foreign

policy at the time, which was to try and cloud the issue of Bosnia and make it seem

somehow beyond rational comprehension. The aim was to induce a �there�s no easy

solution, let�s leave them to shoot it out� type of response in audiences. Moreover, the film�s

subtitle, �Once Upon a Time There Was a Country,� has been taken by many to indicate

that the film is an exercise in nostalgia for Yugoslavia in its largest sense.

Critics interpreting the film in this light have some powerful extra-filmic evidence to

draw on. Kusturica defended the Milo�ević regime in its early years in interviews, and later,

although he was less vociferous in his support, adopted much the same language that

Milo�ević was using to express himself to the press. At the film�s premiere in Belgrade, the

warlord Arkan and other high-profile nationalists were invited and attended.

16 Bruce Kirkland, �Underground Sees the Light,� Toronto Sun , 24 October 1997.

http://www.canoe.ca/JamMoviesReviewsU/underground_kirk.html




Unrepentant

All of these are points which The South Bank Show seemed unwilling to touch upon,

either to defend or attack. As with almost everything in the programme, Kusturica�s own

words, spoken in a thick accent and with dodgy grasp of English grammar (the director�s

quotes have been edited for the sake of readability), are all that was presented.

�I grew up with a certain resistance�which I think is good anyway�to the politicians in

power,� he explains while talking about Otac na slu�benom putu. On Podzemlje itself he says that

it is

about the kind of absurdity of when people swallow the ideological pill.

They basically become hypnotised and they don�t realise that time has

passed. There are endless extended sequences that show what was the lie of

all Communism. [Podzemlje] was made as a deep reaction to all that I felt

about us. It is basically a story about love, about manipulation and about the

tragic history of this country and of its people with their great emotions, and

by their tradition they stay almost half a century behind and developed a

deep misunderstanding with the rest of the world.

He went on to explain that Podzemlje was a reaction to a sort of collective amnesia which

gripped Yugoslavia when it started to break up and that people wanted to deny that

Yugoslavia had ever existed. Podzemlje was, therefore, an attempt to remind people that

�once upon a time there was a country.� However, he did acknowledge that Podzemlje had

attracted some critical flak:




This movie gained me my biggest controversy, you know, because I was not

screaming slogans against Milo�ević. For most people it was a sign I was

Milo�ević�s man. But anyone who sees this film can recognise that

somebody who was close to Milo�ević could never make this film. It was

just a continuation of the absurdity of my life that, on the one hand, I was

described as a darling of the Milo�ević regime [...] and, on the other hand,

Milo�ević�s wife was heavily attacking me in Serbia for not losing even a

minute to portray the Serbian nation in a bad light. And somehow it was

proof to me that I am on the right path.

Such comments are hardly going to convert the sceptical, and presented almost completely

without a context they do little to probe what Kusturica really intended (either consciously

or unconsciously).

About-turn

The failure of the programme did not end there. Following the row over Podzemlje,

Kusturica swore never to make a film again. However, a few years later he was back with

Crna mačka, beli macor (Black Cat, White Cat, 1998). This sudden U-turn is not something that

Kusturica deigned to comment on, and quite why he changed his mind is still not entirely

clear. Although the programme dwelled for some time on Crna mačka, beli macor (perhaps

even a disproportionate length of time in relation to its importance in his oeuvre) there was

little to explain, either directly or indirectly, this most puzzling of conundrums.




All the more interesting to know would be his feelings about making a film about

Yugoslavia at the end of the 1990s in which there is a total lack of reference to the country�s

history and to the wars of succession, as is the case with Crna mačka, beli macor. Some might

argue that there is nothing wrong and perhaps even something commendable in such an

approach�after all, why should we reduce the former Yugoslavia to a stereotype of violence

and internecine war? Nevertheless, the film is something of a retreat from the hard-hitting

approach of Podzemlje.

With Crna mačka, beli macor, Kusturica returns to a subject that has won him

acclaim�the life and culture of the Roma. More than any other film made by Kusturica, this

is a film out for laughs. He does not abandon his love of the absurd. This time, however, it is

channelled more into the set design than into the narrative structure or the plot, both of

which are highly traditional. Lasting a relatively slim 130 minutes, the film sees Kusturica

reign in his ego and create a tightly controlled film which is not going to upset anyone. Its

light, consciously inoffensive style makes it reminiscent of a 1950s Ealing comedy.

Kusturica is now reported (not by The South Bank Show, mind you) to be working on

a Dennis Potter script of D M Thomas� novel The White Hotel. Whether this will see a return

to the director�s old narrative and symbolic adventurousness or see him continue in his new-

found timidity remains to be seen, all the more so since Gerald Fox and The South Bank Show

had nothing to comment on this venture and neglected to question the director on his future

in film.

Until The White Hotel is released, Kusturica commentators have plenty to chew on

and the debate over his career�and especially Podzemlje�is far from finished. To my mind,




Kusturica is likely to be written into the history books not as an ardent nationalist, but as a

politically naive film-maker who has chosen his company foolishly, and as a man whose ego

outstrips his understanding of his actions.

Until a more probing documentary on Kusturica is made, much of this is conjecture,

however, and the vital questions remain unanswered.

Andrew James Horton





�Showtime Brothers!�

A vision of the Bosnian war: Srđan Dragojević�s Lepa sela, lepo gore (1996)

Igor Krstić




A controversial hit Whilst Emir Kusturica�s Podzemlje�bila jednom jedna zemlje (Underground�Once

Upon a Time There Was a Country, 1995) may well be the most famous Yugoslav film of

the 1990s to have divided critics and sparked bitter controversy with its portrayal of modern

Serbian history, it is not the only one. Srđan Dragojević�s Lepa sela, lepo gore (Pretty Village,

Pretty Flame, 1996), a narrative of the Bosnian war shot from a clearly Serbian narrative

perspective, has had praise and vitriol heaped on it in equal measures. The film was shown in

the former Yugoslavia only a few months after the Dayton Peace Accord was signed and

was widely regarded in Croatia and Bosnia as being �pro-Serbian,� a �provocation� and an

�incorrect representation� of the war. A critic writing in a Croatian journal remarked:

This film is humiliating for all those people who know what happened over

the last four years in Bosnia. Imagine how the world would have reacted if

the Germans had made a film in 1946 about the Second World War with the

subtext: �We are crazy�that�s fucking right! But we are the strongest

anyway.�17

17 Marcel �tefančič, �Filmski dnevnik Marcela �tefančiča jr (32),� Arkzin . Zagreb 6 12 1996, no 79, p 35 (translated by the author).




Nevertheless, Lepa sela, lepo gore was the biggest-grossing Serbian film in Belgrade at

the time and�more interestingly�the first Serbian film to enjoy success in neighbouring

Bosnia, Croatia, Slovenia and Macedonia after the dissolution of Yugoslavia in 1991. The

film has also since been shown in the West to critical acclaim.

Whilst judgements for and against the film have been dogmatic, the film itself is a

complex, layered work, which draws on popular film genres to interpret the Bosnian war.

Lepa sela, lepo gore not only uses and re-writes the popular motifs and clichés of the so-called

Yugoslav Partisan films but also employs concepts and stylistic features of American

Westerns and Vietnam films. The complex flashback structure and the various sub-plots of

the film resist a unifying and unambiguous interpretation of the Bosnian war�of causes and

effects or of the roots of the conflict. Instead, the film offers various interpretations and

centers on the antagonisms within the Serbian squad, showing their inner conflicts, their

worn-out ideals and the aimlessness of their lives.

By examining the allusions and subtexts and interpreting the various layers of

meaning related to the war in Bosnia, it can be seen that Dragojević is presenting a complex

narrative, central to which is the symbolism of the �Brotherhood and Unity� tunnel, where

most of the action takes place. The question here is how Dragojević�s film uses this

symbolism to represent the most important issue of the Bosnian war: the roots and causes of

ethnic hatred and irrational violence in Bosnia.

In doing this, I aim to avoid an ethical or moral discussion, which might lead to

misinterpretations and hasty accusations of propaganda, as was seen in the controversy

surrounding Kusturica�s Podzemlje. This reading of Lepa sela, lepo gore will discuss matters of




cinema aesthetics, which, in the view of this author, are the only means through which

cinema can be �political� or �critical.�

Before these issues can be discussed, however, it is necessary to introduce the film

and its plot.

The film

The film tells the story of the Serb Milan (Dragan Bjelogrlić) and the Muslim Halil

(Nikola Pejaković)�childhood friends from a Bosnian village�from Milan�s point of view.

Beginning with Milan lying wounded and traumatized in a Belgrade military hospital in 1994,

the film flits back to various time-frames, recalling Milan�s childhood memories with Halil

around 1980 (Tito�s death), the time before the war in the early 1990s, when the two friends

built up their own car repair shop, and to events during the spring of 1992, when Milan

fought in a Serbian paramilitary platoon, burning Muslim villages and destroying houses.

Milan�s Serbian paramilitary squad is loosely connected to the �official� army of the Bosnian

Serbs. The main narrative of the film centers on the siege of Milan�s platoon inside the

�Brotherhood and Unity� tunnel near his village, surrounded by a Muslim unit.

The first scene is a Communist propaganda newsreel from 1971, when the tunnel

was opened for a never-to-be-finished highway between Zagreb and Belgrade. The tunnel

remains unused and is a forbidden place for Milan and Halil as children, who fear that if they

enter, �the ogre who lives in it will come out and burn all the villages.�




The film uses long scenes of dialogue and, by employing flashbacks, the motives,

conflicts and backgrounds of the characters entrapped in the tunnel are revealed. The

besieging Muslims remain mere voices from outside, mocking the Serbs by parroting Serbian

songs, jokes and insults. The life-long friends become sworn enemies; Milan�s unit has

burned Halil�s car repair shop and Halil�s unit has killed Milan�s mother. At the end, almost

all of the protagonists are dead except Milan, who survives with his traumatic memories. The

film finishes ironically with a Bosnian newsreel, showing the newly rebuilt �Peace� tunnel

officially re-opened.

Partisan films and Westerns

The opening title of the film��dedicated to the film industry of a country that no

longer exists��refers to Dragojević�s quoting, referring and rewriting of established

cinematic genre motifs. One of the main film genres employed by the film industry of �this

country that no longer exists� was Partisan films. Dragojević refers to this immensely

popular Yugoslav genre by casting Velimir Bata �ivojinović as the commander of the

Serbian paramilitary unit. �ivojinović is known throughout Yugoslavia for his appearance in

almost one hundred Partisan films, and is famous abroad for playing Tito�s comrade with

Richard Burton in Stipe Delić�s Sutjeska (The Fifth Offensive, 1972). �ivojinović, named

Gvozden in the film (which translates as �hard like iron�), plays a man living in the past, still

believing in Tito�s Communism and the fight against fascism. A flashback shows him on the

day of Tito�s death (4 May 1980) when, as a high-ranking JNA (Yugoslav National Army)

officer, he runs 350 km to Tito�s grave�an almost religious act of pilgrimage.




The cliché of Nazi Germany�s glorious defeat under the leadership of the deified Tito

had become worn out even in the 1980s, when virtually no Partisan films were produced.18

Dragojević�s 1996 reference to this genre can be seen within the context of the Partisan film

genre as a kind of �Yugoslav Western,� constantly returning to the pioneer days of Tito�s

Communist party and the founding mythologies of the state during the Nazi occupation in

the Second World War. One of the most important Croatian film critics, Marcel �tefančič,

described in a review on Lepa sela, lepo gore, its revision of popular genre mythologies:

it seems that from the Serbian perspective, the war in Bosnia came as a

revision of genre-motifs of famous cinematic texts [...]. More specifically, the

Serbs understand their wars as variations on their myths and also as

permutations of the interior of their myths. That is why it is not surprising

that they try in [Lepa sela, lepo gore] to give the impression that the characters

come straight out of films (films by Sam Peckinpah or John Milius, Vietnam

films, Partisan films and Westerns)�films which represent compact

versions and locations (or battlefields) of popular mythologies. [...Lepa sela,

lepo gore] is a film about a generation that watched the Partisan films of Bata

�ivojinović and ended up in a dark tunnel, looking dangerously like a movie

theater.19

18 See: Daniel J Goulding, �Yugoslav Film in the Post-Tito Era� in Daniel J Goulding (ed), Post New Wave Cinema in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Indiana, 1989, pp 248-284. 19 Marcel �tefančič, �Filmski dnevnik Marcela �tefančiča jr (32),� Arkzin . Zagreb 6 12 1996, no 79, pp 36-37 (translated by the author).




According to the structuralist anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, myths consist of systems

of binary oppositions�rules and codes that turn around oppositions of nature and culture,

animal and human being and individual and society. 20 These myths ensure the permanency

and self-understanding of a social group (for example a nation).21 The cinematic expression

of modern myths within a �national� cinema uses such trans-historical or mythical binary

oppositions. The Yugoslav Partisan film, for instance, represents a constant repetition of the

opposition of good and brave Communists and evil fascist cowards. More significant,

perhaps, is the victory of the (pre-modern) folkloric community of the Yugoslavs over the

modernist alienating technology of the Germans.22

The bipolar / mythic structure of popular genres such as the Yugoslav Partisan film

bears some similarity to that of the classic American Western. As the critics David Bordwell

and Kirstin Thompson suggest, �Quite early the central theme of the [Western] genre

became the conflict between civilized order and the lawless frontier [...]. The typical Western

hero stands between the two thematic poles.�23 The conflict between civilization and

wilderness�a principal obsession of the classic American Westerns�also became a theme

of the Bosnian war itself, which witnessed a regression into savagery, barbarism and primal 20 In: Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology. London, 1972. 21 A lot of studies had been made, in analysing the mythological structures of mostly American Hollyw ood films, w hich proliferate the historically given American ideology through trans-historical mythic structures. A structural analysis of classical narrative cinema for example w ith Vladimir Propps� analytic set of fairy tale structures or Lévi Strauss� model of binary oppositions, w hich operate in narratives as essential structuring principles. 22 In Sutjeska for example the narrative centres on a battle near the river Sutjeska in Bosnia, w here Tito�s partisan army of 20,000 poorly armed soldiers faces a w ell-trained and high technologised German army of 100,000 soldiers. The most significant part of the film centres on a group of 5000 w ounded soldiers, w hich have to be rescued by Tito�s army. 23 David Borw ell & Kirstin Thompson, Film Art. An Introduction . University of Wisconsin, 1997, p 56.




fantasies of the kind of black and white antagonisms that proliferate in popular cinematic

traditions (Partisans vs Germans, cowboys vs Indians, Croats vs Serbs or Serbs vs Croats).

Indeed, one finds in Lepa sela, lepo gore allusions to Westerns, when, for instance, in

one of the flashbacks the Serb soldier (named Brzi, or �Speedy�) meets a drug dealer dressed

like a cowboy. The cowboy dealer tells Speedy in the classic Western manner to behave �like

a man� and go to war. In another scene the (Muslim) voices above the tunnel entrance mock

the entrapped Serbs with lines such as: �When does the cavalry come? Maybe they don�t

have horses?� A more concrete reference is found in a scene in which the seven trapped

soldiers drink urine from a Coca-Cola bottle, clearly referring to Sam Peckinpah�s The Wild

Bunch, a Western made in 1969. Peckinpah�s film tells the story of five aging outlaws

performing their last robberies in Texas and Mexico in 1913. They are themselves trailed by

a group of released prisoners, who are promised their freedom only when they catch the

�wild bunch.� The leaders of the two gangs were once friends, which is revealed in a number

of flashbacks similar in form to the flashbacks used in Lepa sela, lepo gore.

Vietnam films

The Wild Bunch is in fact a self-consciously post-classical Western, because the film

inverts the typical clichés of the classic Western: bad against good and civilization against

nature. The reference to The Wild Bunch in Lepa sela, lepo gore is therefore also a reference to

more recent Hollywood cinema, in which the most significant American genre, the Western,




has faced a fundamental crisis, partly brought on by the Vietnam crisis in American society

at the end of the 1960s.

Lepa sela, lepo gore draws a parallel between the Serbian paramilitaries and Peckinpah�s

bunch, showing the decay of Yugoslav myths of folkloric brotherhood and unity. Like

Peckinpah�s bunch, the Serbs in the �unity� tunnel, gradually become aware of the frailty of

their bonds and the mutually alien motives and concerns with the group. This is most

significantly portrayed in a dialogue scene between Gvozden and Veljo, another soldier in

the tunnel. When Gvozden accuses the younger generation of lacking honesty and honor,

Veljo condemns Gvozden�s hypocrite generation of hard-line Communists:

Do you think that one single house we burned�or ours that they burned�

was honestly earned? If they were honestly earned, they wouldn�t be so easy

to burn. As long as Tito stuffed American dollars up your ass, you did pretty

well blathering about �Brotherhood and Unity.� And then the time came to

settle the bill! You jerked off for 50 years, drove fancy cars, screwed the best

girls and now, you can�t get it up [...] Well I shit on that honour of yours and

your whole honourable screwed-up generation!

This generational conflict between father and son is further explored when Speedy, the son

of a high-ranking JNA general, confesses that going into war for him was more a form of

detox therapy than a meaningful act of defending his country or pleasing his military father.

As in some Vietnam films�for example Oliver Stones� Platoon (1986)� Dragojević

underlines the dilemma of meaning for the Serbs, with the inner conflicts of the group




becoming more significant than the war against the enemy. In fact, it has become a code of

American Vietnam films�John Irvin�s Hamburger Hill (1987), Stanley Kubrick�s Full Metal

Jacket (1987) or Francis Ford Coppola�s Apocalypse Now (1979)�to keep the enemy (in the

jungle) invisible and off-screen, as Thomas Elsässer and Michael Wedel in their essay on

Apocalypse Now describe:

In Vietnam War films [...] the jungle becomes the epitome of the horrible

not because demotivated youngsters face a determined enemy defending

their homelands, but because the films can draw on the topos of the

�monster in the swamp��nowhere to be seen and usually heard too late�

in order to �represent� the Viet Cong.24

In Lepa sela, lepo gore this principle of keeping the enemy off-screen is transformed

into an ironic cinematic metaphor, with the Muslim enemies represented as invisible voices,

sounds and sometimes shadows at the end of the tunnel. Dragojević refers to Vietnam films

more often during the film, for instance when the invisible Muslim �voice-over� wakes the

trapped Serbs with an ironic �Good morning Četniks!� a reference to Barry Levinson�s Good

Morning Vietnam (1987), a film about a radio program in Vietnam. Indeed, the Muslims above

the tunnel perform through cellophones a kind of �radio-program� for the entrapped Serbs:

they �entertain� them with songs, jokes and lines from films. When the final showdown

comes, they end their �programme� with the words: �Showtime brothers! We are closing the

disco. If you didn�t use our happy hour, fuck off!�

24 Thomas Elsässer & Michael Wedel, �The Hollow Heart of Hollyw ood: Apocalypse Now and the New Sound Space� in Gene M Moore (ed), Conrad on Film. Cambridge, 1997, p 159.




The most significant reference to Vietnam film motifs is, however, made to the

famous opening scene from Apocalypse Now, in which appear super-impositions and dissolves

of helicopter blades, close-ups of Captain Benjamin Willard�s head lying on a bed, the

burning jungle and the blades of a ventilator in Willard�s room, all accompanied by the music

of the Doors� �The End.� Elsässer and Wedel argue that:

The complex audiovisual texture of the opening of Apocalypse Now serves as

an apt prelude to the highly subjective mode of narration that will lead both

Willard and the immediately disoriented viewer on a journey through

psychological torment and violent horror.25

Lepa sela, lepo gore contains a similar opening: during the opening titles we hear the

slowed-down sound of helicopter blades, reminiscent of the sound of an old film projector,

or perhaps of a beating heart. The titles with the names of the protagonists are

superimposed on a burning background. Then a slow dissolve moves into a close-up of

Milan�s wounded head, lying in the bed of a Belgrade military hospital, still with the

background sound of helicopter / ventilator blades in Milan�s hospital room. The next cut

shows the actual blades of a medical helicopter. The camera then assumes Milan�s subjective

point of view, showing confusing images of wounded soldiers, who exit the helicopter,

suddenly interrupted by a doctor, who presses an artificial respiration apparatus onto the

camera, signifying Milan�s face.

25 Elsässer & Wedel, p 162.




The distortions of inner and outer reality on both auditory and visual levels, the

intersections of the technologies of warfare (helicopters), cinema (camera) and organic

sounds (heartbeats) introduce various themes of the film:

(1) the entirely subjective mode of narration throughout the film (Milan�s personal

perspective);

(2) Milan�s flashback recollections, signifying both traumatic repetitions and a cinematic

technique;

(3) Milan�s entrapment in the tunnel�a metaphor of the unconscious and of cinema in

general;

(4) the subjectivity of sound sources, either a part of the narrative or superfluous to it.

Poetry and spectacle

Dragojević�s reference to the Vietnam film mode, which represents warfare as a

traumatic distortion of inner and outer reality, refers also to the concept of war as an

aesthetic spectacle. A famous representative of the thesis of the intersection of warfare and

cinema is Paul Virilio, who analyzed the various historical connections between the

technologies of warfare and those of vision in his War and Cinema, The Logistics of Perception.

Virilio describes a phenomenon that Coppola�s Apocalypse Now translated into a

cinematic language, namely that of the intersections of show business and war�the �art of

war� as a spectacle of the senses, a hallucinatory excess of psychological mystification. There




are two significant scenes in Apocalypse Now, which underline these intersections: the

helicopter attack on a Vietnamese village, orchestrated to Richard Wagner�s �The Ride of the

Valkyries,� and the surreal scene in the middle of the jungle, where Playboy models stage a

rock concert for American soldiers.

In Lepa sela, lepo gore, one finds similar interpretations of the cinematic potential of

Bosnia�s war. Dragojević�s interpretation of the Bosnian war emphasizes directly the

aesthetic quality, or the poetry, of the Serbian experience in Bosnia. The title itself (more

literally translated from Serbo-Croatian as: �Beautiful villages burn beautifully�) refers to the

aestheticism of war. The film�s most central scene provides a similar meta-commentary,

when one of the surviving soldiers (the �Professor�) reads to Milan from a half-burned

book, a prose description of burning villages:

Professor: �We were surrounded by a great circle of strange celebration

going on in all those places burning. And the flames just rose up and

licked the clouds.�

[Cut to flashback of the Serb platoon watching a village they have set on fire burn]

Veljo: �Beautiful villages burn beautifully, and ugly ones stay ugly, even

when they burn.�

Professor: �You would have been the best poet in my class, Veljo.�

Veljo: �After so long behind bars, I am as well-read as Rimbaud.�

[Cut to Professor reading from the book in the hospital.]




Professor: �A single village burning is a nice sight. It looks cheerful. An

ugly hamlet you wouldn�t notice during the day, at the bottom of an ugly

little valley. But you can�t imagine how it is at night, when it�s burning,

how nice it looks.�

Naturally, this scene has its connotations, especially considering the fact that

Radovan Karad�ić, the political leader of the Bosnian Serbs during the war who has now

been indicted by the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague as war criminal, is himself a poet

and a grandson of the Romantic Serb Vuk Karad�ić (1787-1864), a transliterator of Serbian

oral epics and founder of Serbo-Croatian literal grammatology. (Indeed, one can say that the

Serbian Karad�ić family stands at the very beginning of romantic Serbian nationalism and

also at its very end.) Radovan Karad�ić was, ironically, involved inarranging the film�s

financing: he initially agreed to help fund it, but then changed his mind and boycotted the

opening night.

The underlying �poetics� of Serb warfare in Bosnia, as it is presented in this scene,

circulate around issues like celebration, violent destruction, fire and the tavern�issues the

Dutch anthropologist Mathijs van de Port in his book, Gypsies, Wars and Other Instances of the

Wild: Civilisation and its Discontents in a Serbian Town, points to in his discussion of the Serbian

sexual economy and their �embrace of unreason.�

Just as wild gestures and savage displays of a lack of control adopted in

the Gypsy bars can be understood as an appropriation of the forbidden

and disgraceful self-images of the Serbs, so the militia seem to adopt the

pose of the barbarian. [...] In the dress of the militia who grow beards and




wear their hair long [...] and sit around the camp fire in the evening

singing of the centuries-old struggle against Turkish domination [...]

Unreason is an attractive attribute which they hope will make them feel

unambiguously Serbian.26

Sitting around the camp fire�in this case the fire of burning villages�and singing the

songs Karad�ić�s grandfather Vuk wrote down two hundred years ago, with their barbarian

appearances and a bottle of sljivovic, we see the stereotypical imagery associated with the

ancient Serb resistance to their Turkish enemies. This is the poetry of the Bosnian war from

a Serbian perspective, and this is what Dragojević is pointing to in this scene: romantic

barbarism, the return to savagery and wilderness, and a folkloric rejection and violent

destruction of civilization, modernity and technology.

Still, Dragojević emphasizes in his film the �modern,� spectacular side of the war, in

counterpoint to the stereotypical images of Serb savagery and romantic nationalism, in order

to present a more differentiated picture. In one scene, the burning of a village is

accompanied by a Serbian rock song, with the words �All of Yugoslavia dances to rock�n

roll, while everything around is going down the hole.� The protagonists dance to this song,

while they set everything around in flames; Veljo sits comfortably in a chair in the middle of

this spectacle and plays with a Game Boy, whistling an old Serbian folk song. The

association of rock music with warfare or war psychosis has been made already in certain

Vietnam films�Apocalypse Now (The Doors and The Rolling Stones) or Platoon (soul music

26 Mathijs van de Port, Gypsies, Wars and Other Instances of the Wild. Civilisation and Its Discontents in a Serbian Town, Amsterdam, 1998, p 219.




with marijuana). The rock song in Lepa sela, lepo gore provides a commentary on the psychotic

subtext of �losing control� and celebration the decay. The Game Boy, an important element

of the iconography of the scene, may point to the virtual nature of war games.

The metaphor of the �Brotherhood and Unity� tunnel

What gives the impression of continuity between Emir Kusturica�s epic film Podzemlje

and Srđan Dragojević�s Lepa sela, lepo gore, despite the difference of genre, historical context

and generation, is an obsession with the theme of the transformation of �blood

brotherhood� into violent mutual antagonism. There is thus a constant reference to the

dominant slogan of Tito�s Yugoslavia: the dogma of brotherhood and unity. Lepa sela, lepo

gore sets its main focus on the �Brotherhood and Unity� tunnel, and the community of

soldiers within it, a setting with metaphorical and literal analogies to the cellar environment

and its community in Podzemlje. The common theme of fraternity seems to point toward

questions of identity and the durability of communities on more than one level. Consider the

problem of Self versus (Br)Other, and the fragility of such relationships, and that of the

contrived �community� or fraternity, with its ideology of �brotherhood� kinship as the glue

in the officially sanctioned social bond.

The objective correlative to these theoretical problems of community and self, and

brother and enemy can be found in the ethnically based antagonisms at the heart of the

Bosnian war, and at the heart of Lepa sela, lepo gore. The entrapment in the tunnel serves as a

metaphor for Milan�s (and the Serbs�) entrapment in the unconscious. Halil and his Muslim




platoon outside of the tunnel become, within this metaphor, voices and shadows of the

ethnic Other: former neighbours and brothers now transformed into blood enemies. The

Muslim voices symbolize perfectly what the Slovenian Philosopher Slavoj �i�ek described as

the �neighbour�s ugly voice��the hated jouissance (enjoyment) of the neighbour.27

The repression of ethnic differences in the old Communist Yugoslavia is symbolically

portrayed in one of the few childhood flashbacks: Halil warns Milan not to enter the tunnel,

because a dangerous ogre lives inside, and when he comes out, he will burn all villages.

Dragan Bjelogrlić, the film�s producer, explained in an interview: �The ogre stands for the

fear of difference, which the people of Bosnia never have been able to accept. [...the ideologies

of] Communism, Brotherhood and Unity have tried to hide this ogre and to lock him into a

cave.�28 �Fear of difference� easily bleeds into a fear of losing one�s own ethnic identity,

which manifests again as an irrational desire to exterminate the threat of the ethnic �Other.�

Lepa sela, lepo gore is a metaphorization of this irrational but essentially human characteristic.

The historical �cause� of ethnic hatred in the case of the former Yugoslavia was�from

Dragojević�s perspective�the dissolution of the ethnic brotherhood ideology, which

provoked an extreme desire to differentiate oneself from one�s ethnically separate neighbour.

As the psychoanalyst Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen explains, this �too-closeness� of neighbours

27 Slavoj �i�ek, The Plague of Fantasies. London, 1997 in the chapter �Love Thy Neighbour? No Thanks!�, p 45-85. 28 Interview w ith Dragan Bjelogrlić in Arkzin No 79. 6 12 1996, p 35 (translated by the author).




provokes violence: �To love one�s neighbour as oneself is no doubt the shortest route to

cutting his throat.�29

Conclusion

Lepa sela, lepo gore provides a Serbian perspective on a highly controversial issue,

considering what has indeed happened in Bosnia and more recently in Kosovo. The film

aligns the viewer unconsciously (viewer-identification) with the perspective of the very

people who raped, burned villages and genocidally executed Muslims and Croats in Bosnia.

This subtle device, which blurs viewer sympathies and ultimately provokes introspection,

understandably provoked an ambivalent public response. Many of the most critical simply

viewed Lepa sela, lepo gore as �politically incorrect� or, more damning still, as propagandistic.

In truth, from the perspective of the critical eye, one sees a paradox of meaning in

Dragojević�s film. On one hand, Dragojević seems to consider the Bosnian war from the

Serb perspective as a re-enactment of warfare fantasies, drawn from the rich metaphorical

vocabulary of Partisan and Vietnam films. On the other hand, the entrapment in the

�Brotherhood tunnel� is an intelligent metaphor for unconscious Serbian fantasies of their

solidarity against the threat of the ethnic enemy. Lepa sela, lepo gore therefore has to be

considered as a film that does not take an ideological side. It is rather a genuinely complex

cinematic exploration of the Bosnian war and, moreover, an exploration of the Serbian self-

29 Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, �The Freudian Subject,� in Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. W W Norton, 1974, p 93.




deception, steeped in fantasies of ethnic hatred, blood enemies and the myths of national

identity.

Igor Krstić





Bibliography Bogdanovic, Bogdan, Die Stadt und der Tod, Klagenfurt, 1993. Borch-Jacobsen, Mikkel, �The Freudian Subject,� in Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, W W Norton, 1974. (purchase from Amazon.com) Bordwell, David & Thompson, Kirstin, Film Art. An Introduction, University of Wisconsin, 1997. (purchase from Amazon.com), (purchase from Amazon.co.uk) Elsässer, Thomas & Wedel, Michael, �The Hollow Heart of Hollywood: Apocalypse Now and the New Sound Space,� in Moore, Gene M (ed), Conrad on Film, Cambridge, 1997. (purchase from Amazon.com), (purchase from Amazon.co.uk) Goulding, Daniel J, �Yugoslav Film in the Post-Tito Era,� in Daniel J Goulding (ed), Post New Wave Cinema in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, Indiana, 1989, p 248-284. Lévi-Strauss, Claude, Structural Anthropology. London, 1972. (purchase from Amazon.com [different edition]), (purchase from Amazon.co.uk [different edition]) Stefančič, Marcel, �Review of Lepa sela, lepo gore,� in Arkzin, No 79. Zagreb, 6 December 1996, p 36-37. Virilio, Paul, Krieg und Kino. Logistik der Wahrnehmung. Frankfurt am Main, 1989. van de Port, Mathijs, Gypsies, Wars and Other Instances of the Wild. Civilisation and Its Discontents in a Serbian Town, Amsterdam, 1998. �i�ek, Slavoj, The Plague of Fantasies, London, 1997 (purchase from Amazon.com), (purchase from Amazon.co.uk)











______________________________________________________________________________________ 2000 Central Europe Review Ltd All Rights Reserved. May Not Be Copied or Distributed Page 62


An Aesthetic of Chaos

The blurring of political subtexts in film depictions of the Bosnian war *

Benjamin Halligan

* The author would like to express his gratitude to Du�an Puvačič, Gordana Vnuk, Clive Meachen, Keith Brown, Wasel Chemij and Derek Prior for their assistance. Parts of this article were presented at the Welsh International Film Festival, Aberystwyth, 20 November 1997 and at Chapter, Cardiff, 27 May 1998 as �Films From the End of Yugoslavia.� A version of this article was originally published in Slovo, Vol 11, 1999, pp 63-78.




The demise of order

The aesthetic of chaos which characterised much of Yugoslav cinema after the death

of Marshall Tito found a match in a content of chaos when war broke out across Yugoslavia

in 1992. Self-management was seen to have ground to a long-anticipated halt with the death

of Tito; in Yugoslavia, Socialism had stultified almost a decade before the Berlin Wall came

down. On the Yugoslav screen, the linear historical narrative effectively ceased and was

replaced by the manifestations of growing chaos�economic and social�that paralleled the

rise to power of:

young urban gangsters in expensive sunglasses from Serbia [and] members of the

paramilitary forces raised by Arkan and others.30

30 Noel Malcolm, Bosnia: A Short History, London, 1994, p 252. Arkan is the nickname of the Serbian w ar criminal �eljko Raznjatović w ho w as assassinated in January 2000.




and their political paymasters, with their propensity to:

engage in seductive oversimplifications of complex issues, to marginalize the

representatives of minority interests (whether ethnic or otherwise), and to harness

nationalism as a false principle of legitimation.31

This tendency in Yugoslav film to override classical narrative conventions and

aesthetic norms might be termed an �aesthetic of chaos,� and is achieved through

meandering, chance-filled, seemingly inconsequential, absurdist narratives and an obsessive

cramming of the frame with detail. It can also be characterised by frantic and energetic

acting, usual locales and juxtapositions on all levels. It creates a sense of a wider activity,

beyond the frame � and that the camera has been thrown into the scene and only partially

captures all that is going on. Both narrative and aesthetic techniques contribute to a sense of

desperation, albeit mainly comic, and the ever-presentness of violence. The aesthetic lends

itself to both scenes of war and drunkenness, and chimes with stereotypical ideas about

Balkan �wild men.�

This aesthetic is manifested in the opening scenes of Srđan Dragojević�s Lepa sela, lepo

gore (Pretty Village, Pretty Flame, 1996), a film �dedicated to the film industry of a country that

no longer exists.� Newsreel footage shows the proud 1971 opening of a tunnel dedicated to

�Brotherhood and Unity� in Bosnia-Hercegovina. This is juxtaposed with a scene from

1980, showing the tunnel abandoned and forgotten, save for an aged prostitute who uses its

31 Sabrina Petra Ramet, Balkan Babel: The Disintegration of Yugoslavia from the Death of Tito to Ethnic War, London, 1996, p 215.




cover. The interim years marked the decline and death of Tito and Titoism (as represented in

the pomp and circumstance of the tunnel opening) and the encroachment of a post-

Yugoslavia sensibility in its wake (that of increasing bureaucracy, the building of petty

power-bases and ignorance borne of political disillusionment and growing nationalism). In a

similar vein, the disconcertingly plot of the allegorical satire Kako je počeo rat na mom otoku

(How the War Started on My Island, Vinko Bre�an, 1996), based on the 1991 Croatian

declaration of independence, is driven not by political imperatives but the foibles of the

characters: infidelity, artistic vanity, stupidity, cowardice and homophobia.

The aesthetic of chaos that had developed in the Yugoslav cinema of the 1980s

allowed for much of the depiction of the war of the 1990s to be taken in its stride. This was

during a time when much of the socially-conscious Western European cinema selectively

presented a reality suggestive of a war-like situation: Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (Stephen

Frears, 1987), C�est arrivé près de chez vous (Man Bites Dog, Rémy Belvaux, André Bonzel, Benoît

Poelvoorde, 1992), Naked (Mike Leigh, 1993), and La haine (Mattieu Kassovitz, 1995), to cite

but a few examples. When a European war arose, however, the cinema it informed seemed

to negate these European attributes of social consciousness and political imperative that

Western critics had come to expect in European cinema. This negation was seemingly

achieved by a further descent into the anarchic and apparently apolitical aesthetic of chaos.

This aesthetic of chaos can, therefore, be outlined by means of an examination of

cinematic depictions of the Bosnian war. All the films considered here were either made or

were partially, fully or belatedly released during 1995 and, with one exception, all are by

directors from the former Yugoslavia.




Magic Realism and Naïve Art

The filmic expression of the aesthetic of chaos encompasses: the anarchic hordes of

economic migrants and urban wide-boys, such as the Gastarbeiter, in Du�an Makavejev�s

Montenegro: Or, Pigs and Pearls (1981) with their surreal erotic cabaret / doss-house, the Zanzi-

Bar;32 religious miracles, crowd hysteria and political skulduggery, as in Goran Paskaljević�s

Vreme čuda (Time of Miracles, 1990), with its echoes of the Croatian Marian shrine of

Međugorje; the gypsy camps, with their blasting music, social codes and rituals and devil-

may-care criminality, that form the background of Goran Paskaljević�s Anđeo čuvar (Guardian

Angel, 1987) and Emir Kusturica�s Dom za ve�anje (Time of the Gypsies, 1989); surreal touches of

humour, as with the child protagonist of Goran Marković�s Tito i ja (Tito and I, 1992), who

develops a taste for the wall plaster of his house; and nature�mysticism, as exemplified in

Kusturica�s Otac na slu�benom putu (When Father Was Away on Business, 1985) and Rajko Grlić�s

That Summer of White Roses (1989).

This anti-realist aesthetic, manifested in scenes of levitation, brawls, wholesale

destruction of property, hallucination, sleep-walking, psychic phenomena, drunken parties,

operatic emotional scenes, wild love�making and fin-de-siècle set-pieces, has frequently been

associated with an undefined Magic Realism (particularly in Western critical writing, and

particularly on Kusturica). Such an association is misleading.33 The narrative and aesthetic

32 The immigrant - or Gastarbeiter - is a central character in Yugoslav culture. The immigrant �look� (ill-fitting and mismatched second-hand clothing) w as fashionable in Yugoslavia in the early 1980s w ith the �New Primitivism� movement in popular music. For a fuller discussion see Ramet, 1996, pp 108-109. 33 For example, Dina Iordanova, �Conceptualizing the Balkans,� Slavic Review: American Quarterly of Russian, Eurasian and East European Studies, Winter 1996, pp 882-890. Fredric Jameson identifies Soviet Magic Realism in The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System, London, 1992, in the films of Andrei Tarkovsky,




elements which constitute the aesthetic of chaos contain aspects of myth, animism (which

may be compared to the films Jean Vigo); mysticism; satire and the absurd (similar to the

novels of Miroslav Krle�a); mythic surrealism (similar to that of the poet Vasko Popa);

intensity and memory (as found in the novels of Danilo Ki�); cinematic trickery (as in the

films of Federico Fellini); and an understated sensuality (present also in the poems of Ivan V

Lalić).

Above all, however, the aesthetic of chaos appears to be most heavily influenced by

the strong tradition of Naïve Art in Yugoslavia (in particular the Hlebine Peasant School of

Painting). The nature of this influence may be seen to be in direct contrast with that of the

Western European cinema, where painterly influences more often come from more

bourgeois-acceptable painters such as Caspar David Friedrich (as manifested in La Strategia

del Ragno / The Spider�s Stratagem, Bernardo Bertolucci, 1970), Francis Bacon (in Performance,

Donald Cammell and Nicholas Roeg, 1970) and Edward Hopper (in Psycho, Alfred

Hitchcock, 1960, for example) and their aesthetic traditions.

The Naïve aesthetic subverts the use of such painterly influences. Not only does it

subvert notions of the aesthetic value of �quality� and �studied� art, but it also subscribes to

a form of �mystification� of the type outlawed for so long by the codes of Socialist Realism.

Sergei Paradzhanov and Aleksander Sokurov�s Dni zatmeniia (Days of Eclipse, 1988). Neither South American or Soviet Magic Realism, how ever, hold much in common w ith the aesthetic of chaos. If anything, Yugoslav films cited as Magic Realist usually have an anarchic narrative structure rather than the strong story-telling narrative drive associated w ith Magic Realism, and rarely deal w ith the equally characteristic clash of cultures.




Such an act, therefore, strikes a new balance and looks to traditions that pre-date Yugoslav

Socialism, cinema and Socialist Realism.34

Elements of Yugoslav Naïve Art which may be found in the aesthetic of chaos are:

the concentration on peasant ceremonies (as in �Gypsy Wedding� and �Woodcutters,� Ivan

Generalić, 1936 and 1959); destruction (�Fire,� Ivan Generalić, 1953; �Beekeeper,� Mijo

Kovačić, 1976, and �Guyana �78,� Josip Generalić, 1978); the equal importance given to the

framing of animals and humans (�The Death of Virius,� Ivan Generalić, 1959, and �Gypsy

Love in Moonlight,� Matija Skurjeni, 1959); peasant clothing (�Beggar,� Mirko Virius, 1938,

and �Cowherd,� Mijo Kovačić); machismo (�Newlyweds from Hlebine,� Josip Generalić,

1975); nature mysticism (�Moses and the Red Sea,� Ivan Vecenaj, 1973); the absurd (�Flee,

you people�,� Ivan Lackovič, 1974); and human qualities attributed to animals (�Crucified

Cockerel,� Ivan Generalić, 1964, and �Musician,� Matija Skurjeni, 1972).35

Of Western influences, Jean-Luc Godard and the films of the French Nouvelle Vague

were particularly prominent, informing the Yugoslav equivalent, the Novi Film movement of

the late 1960s36. Nouvelle Vague influences are apparent in the Novi Film works of Makavejev,

34 The tradition of Naïve art only really exerted a brief influence on Western European cinema w hen refashioned as a counter-culture aesthetic in the late 1960s and early 1970s (by Naïve painters such as Ivan Rabuzin, in �Flow er from Hiroshima,� 1967/68, and Josip Generalić, in �The Beatles in Hlebine,� 1973) and then mainly on the genre film products that fed on the counter-culture. 35 These pictures are reproduced in Arkw right Art Trust, Naïve Art in Yugoslavia (Camden Arts Centre), London, 1976, Oto Bihalji-Merin and Toma�ević Neboj�a-Bato, World Encyclopaedia of Naïve Art: A Hundred Years of Naïve Art, London 1984, and Boris Keleman, Naïve Art: Paintings from Yugoslavia, Oxford, 1977. 36 See Károly Nemes, Films of Commitment: Socialist Cinema in Eastern Europe, Budapest 1985, p 147, Robin Wood et al, Second Wave, London, 1970, pp 32-33, Benjamin Halligan, �Makavejev and Zhdanovism in Nevinost Bez Za�tite� in Slovo, Vol 10, No 1/2, 1998, p 59 and Aleksandar Petrović, Novi Film, Belgrade, 1971, for further connections betw een Novi Film and Nouvelle Vague film.




�elimir �ilnik, and Aleksandar Petrović, among others. Godard�s freewheeling and anarchic

narrative deconstruction, notable in films such as Deux ou trois choses que je sais d�elle, (Two or

Three Things I Know About Her, 1966) and Le weekend (Weekend, 1968), lent itself to the

deconstruction of Makavejev�s narratives and the distorted narrative constructions Majstor i

Margarita (The Master and Margarita, Aleksandar Petrović, 1972) and Okupacija u 26 slika

(Occupation in 26 Pictures, Lordan Zafranović, 1978). These films, in turn, informed the non-

linear narratives and narrative and aesthetic anarchy of the aesthetic of chaos.

Rural sensibilites

The aesthetic is often drawn from the narrative use and presentation of the

immigrant and peasant protagonist. The nature of this presentation, even when removed

from Yugoslavia, remains the same. This Yugoslav sensibility is as present in the Brooklyn

and Arizona of Someone Else�s America (L�Amérique des autres / Tuđa Amerika, Goran

Paskaljević, 1995) and Arizona Dream (Emir Kusturica, 1993) respectively, as it has been

when Paskaljević and Kusturica have filmed in Belgrade.

Someone Else�s America contains elements of tragedy and the ridiculous in equal

measure�namely Bayo�s (Miki Manojlović) search for his lost son, and the disruption of the

realistic mise-en-scène with aesthetic of chaos elements. The latter is especially so in Alonso�s

(Tom Conti) attempts to convince his blind mother that�after a faked plane journey�she

has returned to her native Spain. The protagonists build a well, find a goat, lay a table of

Spanish food and provide the appropriate music for an imaginary Spanish farmhouse in their




filthy Brooklyn backyard. The sham proves successful and the mother dies content, happy in

the knowledge of the supposedly Spanish soil beneath her feet.

Much of the Brooklyn-based footage was shot in Munich and the artificial mise-en-

scène veers towards the control and exaggeration of Fellini�s mock-ups of Rome. Indeed, the

film opens with a rowdy Fellini-esque beach party with hardly an American in sight,

emphasising:

what it means to be a rural European in urban America [...] The images of Spain and

Montenegro are pastoral and romantic, accompanied by traditional music. Their

kitsch quality contrasts with the noisy �Brooklyn� set.37

This jarring falsity is offset by the emotional extremes of the family drama, so that

aesthetic of chaos moments come as a cathartic release. The protagonists float upward in

their plane-seat-armchairs having finally�through death and separation and the incredibly

unhygienic Paradiso Bar run by Alonso�arrived at a happy isle of immigrant confusion in

the middle of the seemingly indifferent setting of urban North America. The trust and

kinship between the immigrants, founded on their common outlandishness, proves greater

than that of the barely-seen bourgeoisie, locked into a system which streamlines only the

trappings of human emotions�much like Makavejev�s happy commune of immigrant

workers in Montenegro: Or, Pigs and Pearls.

Bayo�s agonised search for his son, assumed to have been drowned in an illegal

border crossing in Mexico, holds in common with archetypal American quests in film the

37 Vicky Allan, �Someone Else�s America,� Sight and Sound, May 1997, p 54.




emotionalisation of the landscape (as in the films of Orson Welles and John Ford). In the

claustrophobic cityscape, the epic nature of such archetypal quests becomes trivialised�a

fellow illegal-worker, an American, tells Bayo of the children he has lost to drugs. Perhaps

only the immigrants are left to re-enact such archetypal American quests.

Elsewhere, the immigrants continually celebrate bastardised versions of a wide range

of folk myths far removed from their context�Chinese medicine, Flamenco dancing and

Montenegrin cooking rub shoulders in cramped and illegal immigrant accommodation. The

debris of immigrant life�chickens sleeping with humans, letters from home, the constant

playing of language tapes, shady characters offering illegal border crossings for large sums of

cash�follows the hapless Bayo and Alonso. Even the dialogue of Bayo�s language tape

seems to understand this world: a question regarding why a North London-born man lives in

South London is answered with the maxim �Because it is cheaper to live in South London.�

The Yugoslav sensibility is especially apparent in the cathartic use of the aesthetic of

chaos. To compare Someone Else�s America with other films which use immigrants for

protagonists�Down by Law (Jim Jarmusch, 1986), Leningrad Cowboys Go America (Aki

Kaurismäki, 1989) or Meeting Venus (István Szabó, 1990), for example�reveals that there is

something more than a uniquely Yugoslav slant to the drama as presented. In the tradition

of Makavejev and Kusturica, alternative notions of Mitteleuropa are presented, consisting of

elements as disparate and startling in their aesthetic representation as in the immigrant

characters who embody them. For Paskaljević, the nature of the Mitteleuropa of the 1990s and

the uncertainty of a land prefixed with the word �former� can only be examined in the

removed context of a mock-up North America, introduced with hazy aerial shots of the




Statue of Liberty which might have been taken from a Yugoslav�s dreams in 1995 rather than

cinéma vérité. This paradox of a dream of liberty turning into Bayo�s immigrant reality informs

not only the narrative drive of the film, but also Paskaljević�s own situation in 1995:

Unlike Kusturica, [Paskaljević] refrains from dealing with ethnic strife in former-

Yugoslavia. Yet the struggle of immigrants in America must be both a political and

personal issue for an expatriate film-maker working in a US-dominated market.38

As just such an immigrant film-maker, Werner Herzog found common ground

between West German and American cinema in his use of social realism in his Stroszek

(1977). Tatty bars are occupied by drunks in both Stroszek and Mean Streets (Martin Scorsese,

1973), where the music is the same, the beer is the same, and the characters still have

difficulty keeping hold of their money. Regardless of political ideology, the German film-

maker and the American film-maker will find sympathy, and place the camera level on one

end of the bar, to induce as much from the audience. In his shooting style and the

iconoclastic figures he employs to help him, Herzog re-enacts Jack Kerouac�s crazed

journeys and records of his travels across North America. The North American consumer

society of the 1970s had lost such latter-day archetypal quests�in Herzog�s eyes�and the

immigrant is left to re-discover and re-enact this tradition. This irony informs much of

European film-makers� recent American-based output.

Yugoslav film-makers seem more concerned with excerpting the Yugoslav sensibility

on a film made in a foreign land than mimicking American film à la Herzog. And so,

uniquely, the Yugoslav camera works in the opposite direction, constructing the trappings of 38 Allan, 1997, p 54.




social realism on top of a gradually revealed anti-realist mise-en-scène: that of the Yugoslav

sensibility and an aesthetic of chaos. This is true of Paskaljević and it is in this context that

Kusturica�s Arizona Dream can be fully understood.39 Compared to European World Cinema,

these films demonstrate the pervasive nature of the Yugoslav sensibility, part of which is

perhaps formed by the unusual �processing� of Western influences.40

The contrast between the ridiculous and the tragic, as mentioned above, is mirrored

in the contrasting mise-en-scène of Someone Else�s America. Paskaljević�s placing of strangers in

foreign landscapes recalls the minimalism of films such as Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean,

1962) and Nostalghia (Tarkovsky, 1983) in the scenes dealing with the search for the missing

son. The deep-focus shot of Bayo in foregrounded close up against barren Mexican

countryside exactly replicates shots of T E Lawrence in Lean�s film. The protagonist is

placed against the untouched landscape, alone in his despair. In contrast, the rest of the film

remains deliberately and gloriously shambolic�junk fills every scene, music blares away, and

it remains a while before the audience can be sure which of the many yelling characters

represent the main protagonists. To a certain extent, the unapologetic presentation of such a

mise-en-scène undermines the allusions to epic cinema inherent in the nods to Lean and

Tarkovsky. For Paskaljević, it represents the destruction of the pretension of notions of

39 Vigo�s cinema also took this approach. Review ing L�Atalante at the time of its release in 1934, the critic John Grierson noted �� a style peculiar to himself [Vigo]� At the base of it is a sense of documentary realism w hich makes the barge a real barge� But on top of the realism is a crazy Vigo w orld of symbols and romance.� Quoted in Marina Warner, BFI Film Classics: L�Atalante, London, 1993, p 10. 40 On the eclectic nature of Yugoslav film tastes, see Goran Gocić �Forbidden Fruit,� Sight and Sound, March 1992 and Gerald Peary, �Hollyw ood in Yugoslavia� in Graham Petrie and Ruth Dw yer, Before the Wall Came Down: Soviet and East European film-makers working in the West, Maryland, 1990.




World Cinema and �the foreign eye� that colour much of European cinema�especially

recent Krzysztof Kieślowski and Theo Angelopoulos.

The foreign eye

This is especially salient when seen in the light of Angelopoulos�s vision of the

Balkans in 1995, which is far from Paskaljević�s lowly settings. His stately To Vlemma Tou

Odyssea (Regard d'Ulysse / Ulysses' Gaze, 1995) winds up in Sarajevo at the height of the siege

and works as a dire �state of Europe� address. In every respect, Angelopoulos is �the

foreign eye,� the high European auteur looking into the remains of Yugoslavia. He invokes

Franz Kafka, Michelangelo Antonioni, Joseph Conrad, Casper David Friedrich, T S Eliot

and Miroslav Holub and, in this respect, is the very antithesis of Krle�a, Makavejev, Ki�,

Generalić, Lalić and Popa.41

Similarly European takes on the conflict can be found in Vukovar, Poste Restante (Boro

Dra�ković, 1994, released 1995) and Pred do�dot (Before the Rain, Milčo Mančevski, 1994,

released 1995). Both films set their drama against readings of the political background of the

break-up of Yugoslavia. They have drawn-away from Yugoslavia sufficiently to avoid an

41 The film centres on the quest to find and develop unseen footage of the Balkans taken in 1905 by the Manaki brothers. In a number of sequences, Angelopoulos suggests that this original and God-like �capturing� of reality for its later recreation on a blank screen�the tw o components of cinema and the process of w hich the Manakia brothers w ere pioneers�is an act endow ed w ith a overw helming spirituality. The nature of the process is something w hich is beyond mere filming and projecting in importance; it is the creation of history, and so to deconstruct cinema (as Angelopoulos attempts to do), is to deconstruct history. This may be seen as the counter-balance to the reconstruction of history w hich, as Ramet has identified, has been seminal in the systematic destabilisation of Yugoslavia.




engagement with an aesthetic of chaos, but not as far away as Angelopoulos and his

metaphysical reading of the break-up. The narratives are of a populist Hollywood

construction: relationships set asunder by the war and the subsequent re-evaluation of

values, set against the background of the rise of nationalism, European complacency, a

vicious circle of violence and the historical connections between religions and violence.

Critical reactions to the films highlight the ambiguity inherent in the form of fictional

film. Vukovar, Poste Restante received its UK premier at the National Film Theatre towards

the end of the 1995 London Film Festival.42 An irate audience heckled the director and

writer (Maja Dra�ković) in a rapidly abandoned discussion immediately following the

screening. The film is a skilfully constructed melodrama of characters and families that

quickly evokes sympathy. As a result, the narrative engages the emotions in a powerful

fashion as it shows the audience the consequences of the basic dramatic premise of a

relationship, begun in 1989, between a Croat and a Serb. Within the relatively simple schema

of the melodrama, the film brilliantly frames many harrowing scenes of the siege, and so

attempts to communicate the reality of the conflict, and the ability of fiction film to

represent that reality, in a relatively unpolitical way.

Despite the insistence by the director and writer that that the film was a straight-

forward romance set against the tragedy of the Balkan conflict, the audience of the London

Film Festival took great exception to the supposedly incidental focus on Croatian ethnic 42 The film w as announced as from Yugoslavia and w as screened on 9 November 1995. It w as w ell-received at an Australian premier and w on the first prizes at the 1995 Jerusalem Film Festival. It also played at the Berlin Film Festival in 1995 and the Denver Film Festival in 1994. It w as scheduled for a theatrical release in the UK under the title �Vukovar� in March 1997 but has yet to appear, although it has been released in South Africa, Japan and North America.




aggression and war atrocities and the way in which the nationality of the soldiers who rape

the female protagonist is not made clear. The closing shot is cinéma vérité: a long, aerial

sequence of a devastated suburb of a Vukovar �liberated� by the Serbs, accompanied by a

suitably optimistic score.43 This works to define the film as unambiguously pro-Serb.

Its attractive cast, fighting for love and home (with the confusion of familial home

and geographic �home�) and its populist narrative and polished aesthetic could then be read

as �fascist.� Dra�ković�s apparent shunning of the aesthetic of chaos, in favour of the

uncluttered narrative of the melodrama that would lift his film into the international market

for World Cinema, masks an insidious, even if unconscious, propagandist vision44. In this

way, the politics of Vukovar, Poste Restante recall Slobodan Milo�ević�s international line in

1992-1993�which proved so effective in keeping European Union and United Nations

intervention at bay�that the conflict in Yugoslavia was civil strife, to be quelled by the

army. The implication was that an anti-war stance was a pro-Yugoslav stance, as championed

by Serbia � an idea that resonates in Vukovar, Poste Restante.

43 The �liberation� of Vukovar by the Yugoslav People�s Army might be considered a crime against humanity. The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague has been involved in the investigation of the mass killing of 261 non-Serb men forcibly removed from the Vukovar Hospital. Vukovar is now the site of one of the largest single mass graves in post-w ar Europe. 44 The device w orked in North America, w here critics have tended to read the film as a pow erful romance��set against the futility of w ar��and for the London Film Festival, w here the host of the after-screening discussion idiotically announced that he w ould only take questions of a non-political nature.




A film warning

Pred do�dot contains a similar deceptively simple surface, but to a different end. The

Macedonian and London set film deals with the conflict by proxy. The London section

climaxes with a sudden and unexplained attack on a restaurant, playing on the notion of a

slaughter of bystanders with the bystanders as urban Western Europeans rather than

Bosnian Muslims. The suddenness of the unleased violence comes across as all the more

shocking against the drab London background, which lacks the vitality of the Macedonian

scenes.

Mančevski presents a semi-mythical Macedonia, the components of which are an

Orthodox monastery, Eastern European peasantry, farmsteads and extended families, played

out against spectacular settings�mountain ranges silhouetted against the vaults of the night

sky. Against such a mise-en-scène the growing violence between Macedonians and Albanians is

explicitly associated with the history and religion of Macedonia and the psychological make-

up of its inhabitants. Such a reading of the conflict is similar to that expounded by Robert

Kaplan, and informed the non-interventionist line in the West.45 It dramatises the notion of

the conflict as a manifestation of ancient blood feuds, an unstoppable implosion best left to

burn-out by itself by the wider community. This dramatisation is at one remove, however,

since conflict has not broken out in Macedonia. Keith Brown, taking his lead from

comments made by Mančevski, offers the reading that the film acts as a warning of a

45 Robert D Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History, London, 1994. The history of Kaplan�s take on the Balkan conflict is examined in Elizabeth Drew , On the Edge: The Clinton Presidency, New York, 1995, pp 157-158. See also K S Brow n, Of Meanings and Memories: The National Imagination in Macedonia, unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 1995, p 37.




possible future for the Macedonian audience. The fictional nature of the construction of the

warning is foregrounded by the depiction of an unfamiliar Macedonian countryside and

people. For the Macedonian audience, the film constitutes a potential future, rather than an

account of what was happening. Thus, when asked about Macedonian reactions in an

interview in February 1995, Manchevski was able to give the following answer;

�I was concerned that the people would be upset with me [�] Some people said,

�We don�t all live in run-down villages, we also drive Mercedes cars. Why didn�t you

show that?� But most of them read the film just as I wanted them to, which is as a

warning.�46

The film contains elements of the aesthetic of chaos. A gang of heavily-armed and

volatile villagers, the embodiment of age-old hatred, incongruously sport baseball caps and

white trainers, play rap music and wield Uzi machine guns. A new addition to this vocabulary

is the introduction of modern Balkan images: the United Nation, their vehicles and

personnel, looking hopelessly lost and ill-equipped for the terrain.

The apogee of chaos

This image of the UN occurs again in Podzemlje�bila jedom jedna zemlje (Underground�

Once Upon a Time There Was a Country, 1995). Whereas in Pred do�dot the vehicles are used in

an incidental manner�in a montage of traffic, and as part of establishing shots indicating

46 Keith Brow n, �Macedonian Culture and its Audience: An Analysis of Before the Rain ,� Felicia Hughes-Freeland (ed), Ritual, Performance, Media, London, 1998, pp 172-173.




morning�Kusturica casts the UN vehicle as a clown�s car in a conflict portrayed as circus. It

is in Podzemlje that the aesthetic of chaos reaches the apex of its expression. Podzemlje won the

1995 Palme d�Or in Cannes, to Angelopoulos's publicly expressed disapproval. The film

whipped-up a storm of controversy across Europe, centred on Kusturica�s reluctance to

show Serbian aggression in the film. Much of the controversy targeted the film�s funding

(partly by Radio Television Belgrade), its being made in Belgrade at the height of the

conflict, and Kusturica�s public behaviour�the premiere was reportedly attended by �eljko

Raznjatović (Arkan), the chief of Serbia�s secret police, and the director of Belgrade

television. Kusturica is reported to have supported Milo�ević and Serbian nationalism in the

early 1990s and then moved to a cautious stance against the Belgrade government in the

mid-1990s. After the controversy broke, Kusturica vowed that he would never make another

film.47

The film uses the metaphor of an underground cellar in which politician Marko (Miki

Manojlović) conspires to keep dim partisans, under his friend Crni�s (Lazar Ristovski)

leadership, making armaments from the close of the Second World War through to the

beginning of the Balkan conflict, unaware of the end of the former (indeed, one of their

number is a monkey). The cellar has been seen to be a metaphor for the facets of historical

Yugoslavia�a prison, a device for exploitation of workers and the containment of the wild

Yugoslav spirit, Communism itself and never anything but an illusory and manufactured

47. For a fuller discussion of this, see: Adam Gopnik, �Cinema Dispute,� The New Yorker, 5 February 1996; Robert Yates, �Gone Underground,� The Guardian , 7 March 1996; Stanko Cerović, �Canned Lies,� Bosnia Report, August 1995; and Gerald Peary, �Above Ground: Emir Kusturica Comes Up For Air,� The Boston Phoenix, 16-23 October 1997.




�reality.�48 The film closes with a fantasy sequence, resurrecting long-dead characters on a

small peninsula, complete with on-going marriage party, which breaks away from the

mainland and floats out to sea�a metaphor for the break-up of Yugoslavia into separate

and autonomous regions.

Between these two points, Kusturica infuses the film with �Yugo-nostalgia�:

nostalgia for the gregarious Yugoslav character (the film opens with a drunken party to

celebrate Crni�s entry in the Communist Party); for camp Yugoslav Socialism (newsreel

footage of Tito�s funeral accompanied by Lili Marleen); and for the Yugoslav political

illuminati (Marko is an associate of Tito but a criminal nonetheless�his power base is

derived from the armaments manufactured by the inhabitants of the cellar). Kusturica and

the film�s writer, the playwright Du�an Kovačević, even embed the cliché of inter-ethnic

aggression�that, for some, the Second World War never ended�into the narrative of the

film: for Crni and his associates in the cellar, the war literally does not end, with Second

World War segueing into the Balkan conflict. It is thus that the language of the latter

includes �Usta�a,� �Četnik� and �partisan.�

The film dramatises history as a �tissue of lies� creating and created by impostors at

every level of life. This is notably so in the sequence in which Marko, now a high-ranking

politician, visits the film-set of �Spring Arrives on a White Horse,� a ridiculously over-the-

top Second World War pot-boiler based on Marko�s fictitious memoirs. The film is a satire

on such partisan war epics as Sutjeska (Stipe Delić, 1973), which cast Richard Burton as Tito 48 For example, see Slavoj �i�ek, �Multiculturalism�A New Racism?� New Left Review, September/October 1997, p 37, Adam Mars-Jones, �Vision Improbable,� The Independent (London), 7 March 1996, p 7 (Section Tw o), and Misha Glenny, �If You Are Not For Us,� Sight and Sound, November 1996, p 12.




to Orson Welles�s Churchill. In this sequence, Marko seems cast as a latter-day Radovan

Zogović, the social ladder-climbing poet and politician attacked by Krle�a at the Third

Congress of the Union of Writers of Yugoslavia in 1952.49 Overcome with faked emotion at

seeing the incredible likeness of his supposedly dead partisan comrade Crni, Marko embraces

the effete actor playing that role, crying �Why did they kill you?� The actor�taking his lead

from the social toadying director�returns the influential politician�s embrace and kisses. . In

this sequence, concerned with the reinvention of history, nobody is what they seem and

everybody�s behaviour is driven by a hidden agenda.

The scenes of the Balkan conflict are short and bitter. In Tito�s wake, the political

class has become the business class, and as much business as fighting is shown in the blasted

landscapes. Europe and the UN speed in for what profit is available and allow a freehand to

the warmongers. Kusturica�s view of the Balkan conflict may be a damning indictment of

them all, but lacks the foundation of a political critique demanded by its detractors.50 The

film deals with the effects of three manifestations of fascism (in the Second World War, the

cult of personality in the Cold War and the Balkan conflict) without presenting anything

other than cursory explanations. Such an audaciously �unpolitical� stance in 1995 opens

Kusturica up to accusations of political blindness. Kusturica fills his frame with the aesthetic

of chaos in chronicling the history of Yugoslavia rather than attempt to dissect Croatian and

Serbian nationalism. In this respect, the film�s few predecessors are Saló, o le Centoventi

49 See Daniel J Goulding, Liberated Cinema: The Yugoslav Experience, Bloomington, 1985, p 39. 50 For example, �i�ek, 1997, pp 37-40.




Giornate di Sodoma (Saló, or the 120 Days of Sodom, Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1975) and Okupacija u 26

slika, films which illustrate only the form of fascism, not its content.51

Kusturica makes a telling cameo as an arms dealer. In this role he shows himself to

be profiting from the war (perhaps, at least, through his depiction of it). In a similarly self-

reflective way, the film attempts to place itself within its framework of Yugoslav history. The

deliberately awkward reverse-angle shots between period footage and contemporary footage

which place Marko in the midst of battle or shaking hands with Tito highlight the fakery

Kusturica employs to graft satiric fiction onto newsreel reality. This deliberately shoddy and

unmatched editing mimics the poor Yugoslav aesthetic that characterised so very many

partisan war epics from the 1940s and onward.

Part One of the film opens with a shot of a bathing prostitute. A drunken Marko

places a rose between the cheeks of her behind and captures three reflections of her and the

rose in a three-panel mirror to aid him in masturbation, without the prostitute�s knowledge.

The three panels anticipate the three labelled parts of the film and the images�a rose in a

prostitute�s behind for furtive but gleeful masturbation�reflect something of the nature and

content of Kusturica�s �bad taste� satire, made during the height of the conflict. Kusturica,

one of the finest European auteurs, seems to invites the comparison of his idiosyncrasy

during time of war with that of Ezra Pound, rather than his politics with those of Leni

51 Both these films remain equally controversial. Saló, o le Centoventi Giornate di Sodoma has a long history of banning and censorship. Okupacija u 26 slika, w hich has many thematic and visual parallels w ith Pasolini�s film, has recently been banned in Croatia, along w ith all of Zafranović�s films. He has been forced to leave his homeland, threatened w ith arrest. For a full account see Daniel J Goulding, Occupation in 26 Pictures, Trow bridge (UK), 1998.




Riefenstahl. Meanwhile, �Kusta� is permanently persona non grata in his hometown of

Sarajevo.

Chaos as satire

Dragojević works much closer to the ground in Lepa sela, lepo gore � the film deals

directly with the conflict and 1990s Yugoslav fascism, cutting rapidly back and forth between

several flashback narratives to create a layered and clichéd story of human tragedy: the

friendship between a Muslim and Serb throughout the 1980s; the Serb and his paramilitary

unit trapped in an abandoned mountain tunnel by a revenge-bent Muslim army unit in 1992;

and the once inseparable friends realisation that they find themselves on course to kill each

other. Characters form a cross-section of society�the old guard through to a wasted drug

addict, via a collection of loveable rogues�and the film is shot-through with appalling,

frenzied black humour.

A framing narrative of the remaining, embittered Serbs recovering in a hospital

provides the �present� of the film and offsets the heroics of the battle sequences. The

narrative, with its abrupt flashbacks and the overwhelming amount of information delivered,

initially alienates until the realisation that the film utilises a camp Proustian framework of

recollection (nor does the hospitalised protagonist, Milan, played by Dragan Bjelogrlić, at

first appear to be the Milan in the flashbacks). Many scenes of this recollection have an

exaggerated and hallucinogenic quality that calls into question the objectivity of the mise-en-

scène.




This contrasts with the hyper-realism found in the attention to detail in other

sequences (the paraphernalia of the hospital treatments, encroaching madness, thirsty

soldiers downing a colleague�s urine). Indeed, the film opens with a sequence that announces

the destruction of objectivity: newsreel footage of the opening of the tunnel in 1971 falls

into a surreal nightmare as the politician maims his hand with the scissors intended for the

cutting of an �opening� ribbon. As his wound sprays blood over the horrified children

assembled for the occasion, the band plays on in the vain hope of restoring some vestige of

dignity.

The film puts violence and the immediacy of the armed conflict in the foreground,

although more animals and trees are destroyed than soldiers and civilians. This periodically

lapses into an aesthetic which parodies the militant-nationalist Serbian and Croatian media:

Dragojević, intending to offend, fills the screens with the chaos of destruction, the unreality

of blazing, razed villages, slow-motion shots of victory-drunk soldiers, dancing, waving

burning flags and discharging guns into the air, all to the accompaniment of blasting,

nihilistic rock music.52 Dragojević reinvents the image of the Serb against a backdrop of a

bloodied aesthetic of chaos. He fashions this aesthetic into an audacious anti-Dobrica Ćosić

tableaux of war as human degradation and suffering and manufactured nationalist hatred,

targeting the Yugoslav media in the process.

The Yugoslav literary and artistic traditions and counter-traditions that inform the

aesthetic of chaos in its cinema seem to have been its undoing in 1995, as with varying 52 This, coupled w ith the film�s lack of any explicit indication of Serbian action as aggression, account for the declaration of the film as �fascist� at the 1995 Venice Film Festival. For a fuller account of the controversy see Glenny, 1996, pp 10-13.




degrees of justification European critics denounced film after film as �fascist� and non-

committal. The tempered and informed dissection of the origins and effects of nationalism

that had been expected by these critics was continually frustrated by the use of an anarchic

aesthetic of chaos. This unbalanced any analysis and highlighted the distance between

Yugoslav and European cinema. But to what extent was this descent into the aesthetic of

chaos undertaken to mask the calculated blurring of political subtext? And to what extent

does the negation of analysis suggest that the ideals of the European cinema, founded on

social consciousness and political imperative, no longer apply? Paradoxically, it is exactly this

problematisation of these ideals of European cinema, through the use of the aesthetic of

chaos, that has given rise to a body of films that constitute a discernible part of the

European cinema of the 1990s.

Benjamin Halligan





Bibliography

Vicky Allan, �Someone Else�s America,� Sight and Sound, May 1997. Arkwright Art Trust, Naïve Art in Yugoslavia (Camden Arts Centre), London, 1976. Bihalji-Merin, Oto and Neboj�a-Bato, Toma�ević, World Encyclopaedia of Naïve Art: A Hundred Years of Naïve Art, London 1984. Keith Brown, �Macedonian Culture and its Audience: An Analysis of Before the Rain,� in Felicia Hughes-Freeland (ed), Ritual, Performance, Media, London, 1998. (purchase from Amazon.com), (purchase from Amazon.co.uk) Brown, K S, Of Meanings and Memories: The National Imagination in Macedonia, unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 1995. Cerović, Stanko, �Canned Lies,� Bosnia Report, August 1995 Drew, Elizabeth, On the Edge: The Clinton Presidency, New York, 1995. (purchase from Amazon.com), (purchase from Amazon.co.uk) Glenny, Misha, �If You Are Not For Us,� Sight and Sound, November 1996. Gopnik, Adam, �Cinema Dispute,� The New Yorker, 5 February 1996. Goulding, Daniel J, Liberated Cinema: The Yugoslav Experience, Bloomington, 1985. Goulding, Daniel J, Occupation in 26 Pictures, Trowbridge (UK), 1998 (purchase from Amazon.co.uk) Goran Gocić �Forbidden Fruit,� Sight and Sound, March 1992. Halligan, Benjamin, �Makavejev and Zhdanovism in Nevinost Bez Za�tite,� Slovo, Vol 10, No 1/2, 1998.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0415163382/o/qid=967880736/centraleuropeanr


http://www.barnsdle.demon.co.uk/bosnia/caned.html

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0684813092/o/qid=967880913/centraleuropeanr






Iordanova, Dina, �Conceptualizing the Balkans,� Slavic Review: American Quarterly of Russian, Eurasian and East European Studies, Winter 1996. Jameson, Fredric, The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System, London, 1992. (purchase from Amazon.com) Kaplan, Robert D, Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History, London, 1994. (purchase from Amazon.com) Keleman, Boris, Naïve Art: Paintings from Yugoslavia, Oxford, 1977. Malcolm, Noel Bosnia: A Short History, London, 1994. (purchase from Amazon.com), (purchase from Amazon.co.uk) Mars-Jones, Adam, �Vision Improbable,� The Independent (London), 7 March 1996. Nemes, Károly, Films of Commitment: Socialist Cinema in Eastern Europe, Budapest 1985. Peary, Gerald, �Above Ground: Emir Kusturica Comes Up For Air,� The Boston Phoenix, 16-23 October 1997. Petrie, Graham and Dwyer, Ruth, Before the Wall Came Down: Soviet and East European film-makers working in the West, Maryland, 1990. Petrović, Aleksandar, Novi Film, Belgrade, 1971. Ramet, Sabrina Petra, Balkan Babel: The Disintegration of Yugoslavia from the Death of Tito to Ethnic War, London, 1996. (purchase from Amazon.com), (purchase from Amazon.co.uk) Warner, Marina, BFI Film Classics: L�Atalante, London, 1993, p 10. Yates, Robert, �Gone Underground,� The Guardian, 7 March 1996. �i�ek, Slavoj, �Multiculturalism�A New Racism?� New Left Review, September/October 1997










Serbia�s Wound Culture

Teenage killers in Milo�ević�s Serbia:

Srđan Dragojević�s Rane (1998)

Igor Krstić




A brutal reality

Srđan Dragojević�s Rane (Wounds, 1998), the third feature film by this 36-year-old

director, was by industry standards a low-budget production (USD 800,000), with financial

support coming from various sources, including the Serbian government. Despite this, the

film is a radical attack on the Milo�ević regime. At the time of release, the Serbian

government tried to limit the film�s exposure, forbidding publicity and imposing a complete

media and PR blackout. Nevertheless (or maybe as a result), the film became a considerable

success not only in Serbia and its neighbouring countries, but also on the international film

festival circuit.53 One festival jury member commended Dragojević�s film for �its powerful,

dramatic depiction of the brutal reality and complexity of life in the Balkans today.�54

Rane is not only a powerful aesthetic offering�the film also delivers a harsh and

direct depiction of the brutal realities of violence, criminality and poverty in Serbia in the

1990s. The impression of authenticity is no coincidence: Dragojević cast his two15-year-old

actors from the streets. When the director first met Milan Marić, who plays �vaba, he was

still bleeding from a fight he had on the way to the audition; Du�an Pekić, who plays Pinki,

53 Rane w on, for example, the Bronze Horse at the 1998 Stockholm Film Festival and the FIPRESCI Aw ard at the 1998 Thessaloniki International Film Festival. 54 From the Jury of the Thessaloniki Film Festival. Quoted on IMDb (International Movie Database).

http://us.imdb.com/Tawards?0165546




had tried to take his own life by overdosing on heroin the previous year and, only six months

before making the film, had shot one of his pimp-father�s customers.55

Rane is a film about the social decay and the growing criminalisation of Serbian

society in the 1990s. The film�s socio-historical framework is constructed with MTV-like

imagery, showing people celebrating their new nationalism and later on, during the inflation

and the UN sanctions, fighting in the street for their daily bread. The film concentrates on

the criminal underground world in Belgrade, a world where nationalism, suburban violence

and a degraded Serbian folklore-trash culture exist side by side and which becomes a dead-

end for the two teenage protagonists. Rane shows within the cinematic genre conventions of

the classical film noir how this environment affects the adolescence of two Belgrade

teenagers, their senseless and aimless lives mirroring the absurdity of life in Milo�ević�s

Serbia.

The film

Rane was described in several reviews as the �Serbian Trainspotting.� It deals with the

same thematic language as this British cult film: teenagers caught up in the criminal world,

drug addiction, and senseless violence, all set within a social context of poverty and decay.

The film tells the story of two teenagers, Pinki and �vaba (which can be translated as

�Kraut�), growing up in Belgrade between 1991 and 1996 from the former�s perspective. In

55 Anthony Kaufman and Dave Ratzlo, �Interview : Yugoslav Filmmakers Fight A Different War, Speaking w ith Goran Paskaljević and Srdjan Dragojević,� indieWIRE, 27 July 1999.

http://www.indiewire.com/film/interviews/int_Yugoslavs_990727.html




the opening scene, we see the two sitting in their BMW in the middle of the �100 days� (of

anti-Milo�ević demonstrations in the winter of 1997 in Belgrade).

Pinki�s voice-over narration introduces his best friend �vaba, and he proceeds to

relate in a series of flashbacks how the two friends first became teenage criminals. At this

point, the story reverts to the high period of Serbian ultra-nationalism and militarism at the

beginning of the war in Bosnia (autumn 1991), showing the Serbs� enthusiasm for the war,

and then follows the gradual breakdown of the country, devastated by militarism, economic

decay and UN sanctions. Pinki�s father, a retired JNA (Yugoslav People�s Army) officer, is

forced to stay at home and watch the events on his TV. We see Pinki growing up in his

parents� home, playing with his friend �vaba in a graveyard in Novi Beograd (a Belgrade

suburb).

They soon make contact with their neighbourhood hero Kure (�Dick� in English), a

local gangster who introduces the boys to Belgrade�s criminal world. The biggest impression

on the youngsters, however, is made by a cynical Serbian TV talk show, Puls Asfalta (The

Pulse of the Asphalt),56 a showcase for well-known Serbian gangsters who become living

idols for the young pair. Guided by Kure, they quickly rise to fame as teenage killers and

finally appear on the show themselves.

Lidija, the femme fatale talk-show host, plays a crucial role, as the friends both fall in

love with her and become rivals. Pinki�s father kills himself soon after his son appears on the

TV show, and the two youngsters begin a spree of violent shootings, killing Lidija�s husband

as well as their former father figure Kure and other local gangsters. But Lidija herself decides 56 The show depicted in Rane is based on an actual Serbian TV show .




their fate, when �vaba, believing that Pinki has betrayed him and taken her, shoots his best

friend. Pinki survives, heavily wounded, and after spending some time in a hospital, he calls

�vaba to meet and drive in the BMW to �their� graveyard. During the ride to the graveyard

they get caught in the anti-Milo�ević demonstration (a return to the opening scene). Finally

arriving at the graveyard, an unwritten pact between the youngsters drives Pinki to wound

�vaba four times, inflicting the same number of wounds that �vaba had inflicted upon him.

Film noir: gangsters, femme fatales and tough guys

Structurally, Rane possesses the underlying patterns of classic Hollywood film noir: a male

friendship, thwarted by a jealous woman, ends in deception and violent death. The original

noir films were made during the 1940s and 1950s, during and after the war Second World

War, a period in which Hollywood (with the government�s encouragement and assistance)

was producing numerous patriotic propaganda films. The contrasting film noir was a B-

movie genre, dealing with the dark side of American society in the 1940s, introducing the

modern themes of gender uncertainty, repressed conflict, urban decay, public corruption and

violence. According to its stereotypical definition, film noir possesses several stylistic

features and a specific visual style: the setting of the urban environment, low-key lighting,

fog and rain, the use of flashbacks and voice-over narration, and the predominance of night-

time scenes, creating an atmosphere of anxiety, uncertainty and paranoid disorientation.57

57 Susan Hayw ard explains, �rather than a genre or movement it might be safer to say that film noir is above all a visual style w hich came about as a result of political circumstance and cross fertilization.� Susan Hayw ard, Key Concepts in Cinema Studies. London and New York, 1996, p 117.




Rane pays tribute to these genre conventions, developed during the classic period of the

noir gangster film, but re-configures these notions in a postmodern way, within a specific

cultural and social context: Serbia in the 1990s. It is a particularly self-conscious irony that

characterises the film�s use of conventional crime noir patterns. In one scene, in which Kure

teaches the two boys how to perform in their first sexual encounter, he explains: �Do you

know why there were no sex scenes in old American movies? Because Bogey and Cagney

didn�t want to sell their guts.� Pinki and �vaba are themselves not interested in Kure�s

heroes, Bogey and Cagney. They prefer living Serbian legends of the underworld, who

appear weekly in Puls Asfalta. This mimetic identification with gangster legends from cinema,

TV or real life is a basic theme in Rane. The film scholar Thomas Elsässer discovered a

similar theme in Fassbinder�s early gangster films, observing that in them:

the heroes� desire does not revolve around the acquisition of money or

women but is a completely narcissistic desire to play their role

�correctly.� Both men and women have a conception of themselves

whereby their behavior is defined by how they wish to appear in the eyes

of others: as gangsters, pimps, tough guys, prostitutes, femme fatales. They

play with the roles with such deadly seriousness because it is the only way

they know how to impose an identity on aimless, impermanent lives.

What authenticates these roles is the cinema itself, because it provides a

reality more real, but it is a reality only because it implies spectators.58

58 Thomas Elsässer, �Primary Identification and the Historical Subject: Fassbinder and Germany,� in Phil Rosen, Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology. New York, 1986, p 542.




Gangster movies provide a variety of role models, most exhibiting the popular

mythologies of manhood and toughness. It is Pinki�s and �vaba�s deeply felt wish to appear

on Puls Asfalta, which would authenticate their identity as teenage gangsters. Rane, therefore,

can be seen as a film that uses those conventional patterns of the crime noir genre only to

invert its original purposes: the hard-boiled tough guy becomes a narcissistic copy without

an established identity, for whom killing is just a virtual game without any meaning.

Natural born killers and the paranoid public sphere

In the first half of the film, Rane does not concentrate on crime or gangsters. The

film tells a story of boys growing up in a time of social and economic decay, in a paranoid

and nationalistic society. The exchange of Tito�s picture with one of Slobodan Milo�ević in

Pinki�s father�s living room signifies how quickly the change from one symbolic order to the

next occurred within Serbian families. TV plays a crucial role in Dragojević�s film, for Pinki

and particularly for Pinki�s father Stojan, a retired JNA officer caught by the nationalist

manipulations of the state-controlled TV. TV depicts the Serbian occupation of Vukovar in

1992 as liberation from the �Usta�a terror� and one constantly sees propaganda video-clips

of the brave and technologically advanced Serbian army accompanied by patriotic Serbian

folk songs. The daily news on TV announces in 1992 that the UN sanctions against Serbia

are �one of the greatest crimes against humanity in the history of mankind,� followed by a

folk song with the lines: �They won�t get us down, even if the whole world is against us.�




The quote �The whole world is against us� can be seen as a key by-line of Milo�ević�s

anti-Western propaganda, delivered by the state-controlled media during the 1990s. The

media created a public sphere, which Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer have defined in

connection with Nazi Germany as a �paranoid public sphere�.59 This paranoid spiral of

hatred and violence led Serbia�s people to believe in a series of new �demonic enemies�

threatening to destroy the nation: the Croats, the Albanians in Kosovo or the Muslims in

Bosnia.

After the Dayton Peace Accord in December 1995, Serbia faced the aftermath of

UN sanctions and Milo�ević�s international political isolation, both resulting in a dire

economic and social crisis. The paranoid spiral of violence against �the other� was played

out in several directions. The Serbian army fought a civil war against the Kosovo Liberation

Army (KLA) in Kosovo, while the Serbian police fought so-called �homeland traitors�

(independent journalists or opposition politicians inside Serbia). Public violence, youth

crime, drug addiction and organized criminal networks became an everyday phenomenon in

Serbian urban centres such as Belgrade, Ni� and Novi Sad. Particularly in the urban

peripheries, in suburban slums, a new level of criminality appeared during the 1990s.60

59 Theodor W Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment. London, 1972, p 179-200. 60 A documentary by the independent radio station B92, Vidimo se u citulji (The Crime that Changed Serbia, 1996), presents several w ar and other criminals, w ith interview s about their criminal lives and activities. The documentary show s how the phenomenon arose during the 1990s in Serbia and how some criminals achieved a status of �living legends� w ithin the Serbian public sphere. Several fiction films havebeen made about this subject, among them Dragojević�s Rane, but also films like Boban Skerlić�s Do koske (Rage) in 1996 (promoted as the first Serbian �action movie� and sponsored by the state-run media).




The TV-led discourse in Rane and its effect on the people suggest a close relationship

between nationalism and militarism in the public sphere and the folkloric sense of

community they try to create.61 Dragojević emphasizes how the public media discourse

generated both a collective paranoia and hatred and a nationalistic or folkloric community

that was based on public fascination with warfare against enemies. The connection between

folklore and violence is suggested in a scene in which Kure starts a brawl in a Serbian bar,

accompanied by a Serbian folk singer and his girlfriend, singing her song in the middle of

this chaos. Kure and his singer-girlfriend Suzana also suggest an ironic reference to two

icons of the Serbian public sphere, the couple Arkan and Ceca� warlord and popular

Turbofolk singer respectively, and another example of a �marriage� of violence and folklore.

The figure of the serial killer or mass murderer achieves within this pathological

public sphere the status of a celebrity, as a �natural born killer��a phenomenon that

American culture critic Marc Seltzer identifies in contemporary American society, in his

book Serial Killers, Death and Life in America�s Wound Culture. He shows how compulsive killing

is one of the crucial elements of America�s popular culture, in which addictive violence has

become a collective spectacle and a nodal point, where private desires and public fantasies

cross.62 The figure of the serial killer (best embodied in persons like Arkan) has also become

central in Serbia�s popular culture�a crucial figure for identification and public fantasy in

Serbian TV, print media and fiction. In Rane, Pinki and �vaba fail to distance themselves

61 The Serbian anthropologist Ivan Čolović has w ritten an excellent book on the connections betw een folklore, politics and w arfare in the Serbian public sphere. See: Ivan Čolović, Bordel ratnika. Folklor, politika i rat. Beograd, 1993. 62 Mark Seltzer, Serial Killers.Death and Life in America�s Wound Culture. New York and London, 1998, p 1.




from these representations, and indeed try to emulate their criminal heroes. Their acts of

violence and serial killing amount to mimetic role playing�compulsive addictions necessary

to achieve the celebrity status of �natural born killers.�

Kitsch and death, Turbofolk and graveyards

Also characteristic for film noir are its stylistic and thematic roots in the so-called

�pulp fiction� of 1930s America. Rane itself is a cinematic treatment of typical Serbian �pulp

culture�: the film�s setting and iconography draw on a kind of �pulp� environment, a world

replete with signs, commodities and symbols of kitsch, camp and trash. The graveyard in the

hills of the Belgrade suburb, for example, where the boys spend their time together and to

which they return in the end, is not only a graveyard for dead bodies but also for old cars�a

scrap yard as well as a graveyard. The mise-en-scène of this grave / scrap yard suggests the close

connection between modern, mass-production trash culture and death.

One of the most vivid treatments of this trash culture in Rane can be found in the use of

commodity-obsessed Serbian Turbofolk music, which blurs elements of the machine and the

organic, the modern with the traditional. Kure and his Turbofolk-singing girlfriend, Suzana,

are the film�s principal representations of Serbian trash culture, and they are adorned with its

material symbols: the obligatory BMW, golden crucifix necklaces, and Nike sports shoes.

The Dutch anthropologist Mathijs van de Port describes this phenomenon in his book

Gypsies, Wars and Other Instances of the Wild. Civilisation and Its Malcontents in a Serbian Town, as

follows:




Unlike folklore, Turbofolk is shamelessly commercial mass production.

The text, music and visual presentation are an amalgam of traditional and

modern [...] Traditional folk melodies accompany texts referring to such

present-day phenomena as foreign currency, weekend romances, tractors

and bio-energy. Alternatively, a Germanic-sounding �Schlager� melody

may accompany songs celebrating the place of birth, or even nostalgia for

the traditions that are no more.63

This music and its commodity universe represent a blurring of Western urban culture

with nostalgia for a rural way of life. This melding is most significantly developed in the

image of the flat of �vaba�s grandmother: she lives with her TV and her chickens in the

middle of a Belgrade suburb and smokes marijuana (unknowingly) with her grandson, while

telling �fairy tales� of gruesome massacres perpetrated by the Croats during the Second

World War.

Another dominant theme in Rane centres on the crucifixion myth, alluded to by the

ubiquitous golden crucifix necklaces and images of Jesus Christ�s crucifixion. Srđan Vučinić,

a Serbian film critic, explains in a review of Rane the significance of the �Christ on the

Cross� image:

From beginning to end, Rane explores the essence of Kitsch [...].

Wounding, killing and burying merge with show-business, and robbery

with national myths. Very often this kitsch universe is sublimated in the

63 Mathijs van de Port, Gypsies, Wars and Other Instances of the Wild. Civilisation and Its Discontents in a Serbian Town, Amsterdam, 1998, p 57.




mise-en-scène (for example, when Kure practices push ups watching Puls

Asfalta on TV, while in the background behind him hangs a huge picture

of The Last Supper) or in a parallel montage (Pinki masturbates in the

toilet, while his father Stojan watches the bombardment of Vukovar on

TV) [...] The fatal conclusion of the film is just a logical effect of the

kitsch universe, of which the characters are only a product. [...] The

golden necklace with the figure of Jesus Christ on the crucifix is not

accidentally the central icon of Rane�it is its symbolic core. This symbol

stands for the kitsch universe of Christian iconography.64

The relationship which Vučinić describes is what one might call the connection between

representations of death and death itself. Rane is full of such references, all symbols or

metaphors for death: the graveyard, students in death masks in the anti-Milo�ević

demonstrations, and the skull-and-crossbones flags associated with the nationalist euphoria

of 1991. The kitsch universe of Turbofolk, nationalist TV propaganda, crime movies and TV

talk shows is constantly set against these signs and symbols of death. The crucifix as the

central icon and the graveyard as the central space of the film become metaphors for the

close connection between kitsch and death. The film thus offers an interpretation of the

social decay of Serbia in the 1990s, drawing upon transformations within this society (from

Tito to Milo�ević, from Socialism to �Democracy lite�), which could be best described as the

death of a traditional value system and the emergence in its place of a culture of superficial

reference and misleading appearances.

64 Srđan Vučinić, “ Putovanje na kraj noći. Rane Srđana Dragojevića,� Reč 46 (June 1998).




Conclusion

Dragojević�s previous film, Lepe sela, lepo gore (Pretty Village, Pretty Flame, 1996), had

culminated in some form of catharsis. �That�s why it was extremely popular, because it

produces a lot of tears and audiences can feel better,� Dragojević told indieWIRE magazine

in 1999. �In the case of Rane, I didn�t want catharsis at all. I wanted a stone in their throats

after the screening, and that�s all. Probably because of my rage against the Serbian regime.

Eight years I had to live in my country, with the hunger, poverty, criminality, cowardliness of

the people, and losing any kind of hope.�65

Rane�s final scene, the �shoot-out� between Pinki and �vaba in the graveyard, can be

seen as a programmatic reference to the self-destructive forces active in today�s Serbia. One

may even speak of a culture, in which senseless killing and violence now belong to the Serbs�

sense of themselves: as a wounded people that keep on wounding themselves, and even their

best friends and neighbours. We can apply Mark Seltzer�s notion of America�s �wound

culture� to modern Serbia. The wound stands paradigmatically as a metaphor for a culture

that is traumatized by endless war and everyday violence, and morbidly obsessed with it.

This is Dragojević�s �stone in the throat.�

65 Anthony Kaufman and Dave Ratzlo, �Interview: Yugoslav Filmmakers Fight A Different War, Speaking with Goran Paskaljević and Srdjan Dragojević,� indieWIRE, 27 July 1999.





Bibliography Adorno, Theodor W. and Horkheimer, Max, Dialectic of Enlightenment. London, 1972. (purchase from Amazon.com), (purchase from Amazon.co.uk) Čolović, Ivan, Bordel ratnika. Folklor, politika i rat. Beograd, 1993. Elsässer, Thomas, �Primary Identification and the Historical Subject: Fassbinder and Germany,� in Philip Rosen, Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology. New York, 1986. (purchase from Amazon.com), (purchase from Amazon.co.uk) Hayward, Susan, Key Concepts in Cinema Studies. London and New York, 1996. (purchase from Amazon.com), (purchase from Amazon.co.uk) Hirsch, Foster, Afterword in Carlos Clarens, Crime Movies. New York, 1997. (purchase from Amazon.com), (purchase from Amazon.co.uk) Kaufman, Anthony and Ratzlo, Dave, Interview: Yugoslav Filmmakers Fight A Different War, Speaking with Goran Paskaljević and Srdjan Dragojević. indieWIRE, 27 June 1999. Seltzer, Mark, Serial Killers. Death and Life in America�s Wound Culture. New York and London, 1998. (purchase from Amazon.com), (purchase from Amazon.co.uk) van de Port, Mathijs, Gypsies, Wars and Other Instances of the Wild. Civilisation and Its Discontents in a Serbian Town. Amsterdam, 1998. Vučinić, Srđan, “Putovanje na kraj noći. Rane Srđana Dragojevića.� Reć 46 (June 1998).















Vignettes of Violence

Some recent Serbian screen attitudes *

Andrew James Horton

* This chapter is a re-edited version of two articles: �Vignettes of Violence,� Central Europe Review, Vol 1, 1999, No 18 and �It Was a Dark and Stormy Night...,� Central Europe Review, Vol 1, 1999, No 5.

http://www.ce-review.org/99/18/kinoeye18_horton1.html

http://www.ce-review.org/99/5/kinoeye5_horton2.html




Wherever your sympathies lie, you have to admit that the 1990s have been a

traumatic decade for Yugoslavia, marked by violence, fear and bloody rage. Hardly what one

would assume to be ideal conditions for the development of a national film industry. And

yet against all odds, Serbian film production has continued and the results have attracted

worldwide attention and acclaim. War and international isolation may have hindered

production and distribution of Serbian films, but they have at least left directors with plenty

to meditate on. Just as it is almost impossible to make a film in Hollywood which is not

bathed in opulence and glamour, so directors from Yugoslavia cannot avoid the underlying

social tensions that have driven the country�s politics in the 1990s.

This has made recent Yugoslav cinema compelling viewing, whether you are

watching cheap trash for a domestic audience or the art house productions for international

consumption. A brief look at six feature films from the period 1998 to 1999 illustrates the

point. 66




Epic violence

Miroslav Lekić�s No� (The Dagger, 1999), billed as the most expensive Serbian film

ever made, desperately tries to mould itself as an epic love story in the manner of Dr Zhivago

or The English Patient. Like its role models, No� is based on a best-selling book, the novel of

the same name by Vuk Dra�ković, which, as the film�s English-language publicity goes out

of its way to point out, is in fact not just a popular book but �literature.�

The story starts when the Muslim Osman family kidnap, forcibly adopt and

Islamicise the youngest son, Illija, of the Orthodox Jugović family. When Serb troops come

on a revenge attack, they take back the wrong son, leaving Illija�or Alija as he is now

known�to grow up a Muslim, unaware of his true identity. Even though the Serbs took his

�brother,� and his �mother� is fiercely anti-Serb, Alija is a relatively cosmopolitan Sarajevo

urbanite who falls in love with a Serbian girl, Milica. Ethnic differences, however, lead to the

couple�s break-up.

Alija�s identity is repeatedly challenged, first with the revelation that the Osman

family is just a branch of the Jugovićs, and secondly when he finds out who his real parents

actually are. In the Bosnian war, he meets his brother, who has grown up with a virulent

anti-Muslim streak. Illija (as he is now called again) persuades his brother that he is in fact an

Osman, and the film ends with the two sitting and pondering who they are and who they

should hate, as the battle rages around them.

No�, like Srđan Dragojević�s international hit Lepe sela, lepo gore (Pretty Village, Pretty

Flame, 1995), is an attempt to explain how bosom friends became archenemies in the




Bosnian war. The two stand in stark contrast to each other, however. Lepe sela, lepo gore is a

blackly humorous and ironic depiction of war which ultimately shows the futility and idiocy

of inter-ethnic hatred. No�, on the other hand, has no room for the comic and glorifies these

tensions, showing them to be essential and even heroic.

For a film which publicises itself as a love story, romance is remarkably lacking, and

Milica vanishes from the plot at a relatively early stage. Although she remains in the hero�s

mind, No� is a story about what goes on between men, brotherly love and bitter rivalry to

the death. In this way, war and hatred triumph over romance, as Alija becomes more

concerned with who he is than with who he loves.

In contemplating his identity, Alija�s catchphrase becomes �blood is blood,�

reflecting the film�s concerns with justifying racial divisions and the notion that the parents

you are born to are at least as important in defining you as what you experience in your life.

If that weren't enough, the Muslims are portrayed as barbaric instigators of unprovoked

violence against innocent Serbs, while Serb violence, when it occurs, is portrayed as justified

revenge. Furthermore, Islamicism is shown as a form of treacherous deviancy. The Muslims

are portrayed as desiring a Turkish invasion of Serbia in the 1950s to re-establish an Islamic

empire in Europe, and the relationship between the Osmans and the Jugovićs emphasises

that the former are the off-shoots of the latter, with the implication that the Jugovićs, being

older, have some form of greater legitimacy.




Sex and violence

Gorčin Stojanović�s Str�ljen (The Hornet, 1998) is a less outwardly jingoistic piece of

cinema (and a far cheaper one, too, with Stojanović coaxing out some very poor acting from

some usually fine performers), but it ultimately cashes in on society�s prejudices and fears.

The plot concerns Adriana, a young Serbian girl who falls in love with an Italian, who

introduces her to a lavishly romantic world of Japanese restaurants, expensive presents and

luxurious apartments. Just when she thinks she has found perfect happiness, she starts to

suspect he leads a double life. Sure enough, this generous and warm-hearted man turns out

to be a ruthless Albanian terrorist�code-named the Hornet.

Interestingly, this is not just a tale of a love which turns out to be a thin illusion. As

he fears his secret is being discovered, Milijam (the Hornet) uses first coercion and then

violence to restrain Adriana. This adds a new dimension to their relationship, and as

Milijam�s brutal nature starts to emerge their affair develops from a nervous and even

childish romance into a passionately carnal one. The film (sponsored by Avis and Diners

Club International) and its equation of macho violence with the sexual admiration of young

and beautiful women culminates with the two gazing lovingly into each others� eyes from the

opposite sides of a police stake-out after Milijam brutally murders his brother.

Radivoje Andrić�s Tri palme za dve bitance i ribicu (Three Palms for Two Punks and a Babe,

1998) is a rather more interesting mixture, both teasing society�s expectations and living up

to them. Tri palme launches off with a sequence which matches the mock newsreel opening

of Lepe sela, lepo gore in the hilarity of its satire. An American news reporter comments on

how drastic the Yugoslav situation has become, mocking Western perceptions of Serbian




society whilst wryly acknowledging the half-truth behind them, as the presenter reports on

inflation of three billion per cent a month, how elderly crones are reduced to climbing high

trees to forage for fruit and how Serbs have to recycle their condoms. But Andrić can�t keep

up the satire, and the film soon descends into a well-paced but rather mundane plot about a

bank robbery. The humour returns in occasional bursts, with the duplicity and criminality of

modern Serbian society in general, and its banks in particular, as targets for attack.

The film, though, is ultimately driven by the notion that the only way to get your way

in a criminal society is to turn criminal yourself. Robbing criminals, as one character points

out, is not crime. Although this message is delivered with more than a light dose of irony,

there is an inescapable measure of admiration thrown in as well.

Točkovi (Wheels, 1999) employs a similar balance between satire and sincerity, hardly

surprising considering that the writer and director, Đorđe Milosavljević, also worked on the

screenplay for Tri palme. This dark thriller set in an isolated motel on an excessively stormy

night, with a group of people trapped in the Točkovi motel as a serial killer in their midst

picks them off one by one. The victims, however, are not as innocent as they first seem.

Točkovi explores the two-sided nature of Serbian society, where nobody is quite what

first appearances might make them out to be. Slick, violent and driven by an insistent and

catchy soundtrack, Točkovi could nearly be a perfect piece of cinematic suspense, the

climactic flaw coming only in the film�s limp and unconvincing ending. The film�s treatment

of violence has inevitably led the unimaginative to label it �Tarantinoesque.� Milosavljević's

screenplay, however, has less to do with a fashionable American film director and more to

do with a decidedly un-hip English author. Točkovi seemingly takes its starting point from the




Agatha Christie novel originally called Ten Little Niggers, a title so outrageously offensive it

was eventually changed to Ten Little Indians. The inspiration apparent in the film�s plot

premise also emerges in the ditty �Ten Little Indians,� which the killer in both the book and

the film sings.

To say Točkovi is an adaptation of Ten Little Indians might be going too far. However,

Točkovi does neatly take the essence of Christie�s depiction of the English home counties and

transposes them into rural Serbia. Both are apparently civilised worlds of order, good

manners and affluence, beneath which lurk dark secrets that society dares not talk about.

Perhaps the difference is that Christie�s England was a rather fantastical invention, intended

to make middle-class England seem exciting and gutsy in order to take people�s minds off

just how boring it really was. Milosavljević�s Serbia, although not a naturalistic portrait, is

nevertheless a reflection of a real situation. Indeed, the film is dependent on that for its

satirical elements. However, this ultimately leaves the viewer questioning what Milosavljević

is really trying to say in his handling of violence with an almost affectionate humour.

Violence against violence

Whatever criticisms you may like to level at Točkovi for glorifying screen violence,

they are nothing compared to Boban Skerlić�s Do koske (Rage, 1998), which is truly strangled

by its self-contradictory aims: a violent film to argue against violent films.

With by far the most litres of blood shed of all the films at Raindance, Do koske

revels in a violence that can only be called cinematic in its obsession with style and youthful




good looks. The plot pretext is the kidnapping and torture of Mr Kovać, the local gangland

boss (played by Lazar Ristovski, best known for his Crni in Kusturica�s Podzemlje), by a group

of disaffected youths who seek revenge for their expendability and worthlessness in society.

The film ends with an implausibly high body count and a message of peace and

reconciliation, but the latter is an artifice to provide a morally acceptable ending to a self-

indulgent film. �They have replaced life with movies,� comments Kovać in a closing speech

which bemoans the influence of American cinema and drugs on youth. And yet it is hard to

imagine a film which glorifies the voyeuristic barbarism of American cinema more.

With its graphic and sadistic rape scene (which carries the implicit notion that a

woman will still love a man even if he sanctions her rape), and the contradiction between its

half-hearted message and its substance, Do koske is a morally repugnant film. However, it has

to be conceded that it is also an incredibly well-made one. It suffers from none of the sloppy

immaturity of Str�ljen or the excessive matinee melodrama of No� and its ending is�

dramatically at least�far stronger than that of Točkovi. It, therefore, emerges as slick,

presentable and a disturbingly watchable product.

One night of madness

However, the most accomplished film of Raindance�s selection, and the most

famous, was Goran Paskaljević�s Bure baruta (Cabaret Balkan, 1998).67 This French-Yugoslav

67 The film�s title translates directly into English as �The Powder Keg.� For legal reasons, the film is marketed in English as Cabaret Balkan.




co-production bears the curious claim to fame that it is �the first Yugoslav film to be filmed

exclusively at night� and in some ways has aims just as self-contradictory as those of Do

koske. Set in Belgrade the night before the Dayton Peace Accord is signed, Bure baruta is one

night of Balkan madness as a small group of characters become entangled in a series of

violent episodes. Although the characters believe they control the power they wield, it

invariably comes back to consume them.

Paskaljević�s aim in Bure baruta was to show how the war in Bosnia affected ordinary

people who were not at the front-line. Aided by a strong and gritty script (based on the play

of the same name by Dejan Dukovski), Paskaljević aims to pull off a film that depicts the

horrors of violence (and especially against women), without reducing the characters to

cardboard stereotypes of evil. The protagonists in Bure baruta are all touchingly human and in

some ways we can all identify with them and the horrific situations they find themselves in.

At the same time, Paskaljević shows how their basic human flaw�the desire for revenge�

destroys them, and in this sense Paskaljević is highly critical of the protagonists and their

actions.

Like Do koske, Bure baruta is a film which uses violence to condemn violence. Bure

baruta is, however, a subtler and more challenging film. Whereas Do koske reduces violence,

rape and death to screen cliches for the sake of making a visual impression, Paskaljević�s film

is more measured in its execution and effect, even though it deals with the same themes.

Although held in a framework of stories that interlock so tightly they cannot be considered

naturalistic, the brutality of the film is horrifyingly non-cinematic. Moreover, the violence is

contained not so much in the actions as in the dialogue and the plots, and Paskaljević and




Dukovski emerge as keen observers of human behaviour, whereas Skerlić comes over as

merely a skilled manipulator of screen potential.

Madness for Milo�ević?

Bure baruta has already had international success, picking up awards at Venice and the

European Film Awards, to name but two. Paskaljević is indeed already an established name

in Yugoslav film history with such films as Vreme čuda (Time of Miracles, 1990) and Someone

Else�s America (1995) to his name.

However, this may not silence all the critics. Recent years have seen many Yugoslav

films undergo re-evaluation, and several films previously thought to be anti-Milo�ević in

their message are now thought to implicitly support the Yugoslav leader. In particular, the

whole idea of �Balkan madness� has been criticised as presenting an image of Balkan

violence as irrational and, therefore, unstoppable and uncontainable by the forces of reason.

This depiction, the argument goes, is pro-Milo�ević in that it advocates violence as an

inevitable outcome of the Yugoslav predicament and something which the West cannot

control.

Furthermore, the obsession of Yugoslav films with trying to pass the blame for

violence onto another party has also met with harsh words from critics.68 Blame is an

important theme in Bure baruta, and the characters continually question who is guilty and

argue their innocence right up to the final moments of the film�s explosive end. 68 See Péter Krasztev�s chapter �Who Will Take the Blame?� in this volume.




Conceivably, some critics might find Bure baruta to be pro-Milo�ević in this sense. Its

notions of Yugoslavia as part of some senseless �cabaret Balkan� over which the characters

have no control, and the continual questing for someone to take the blame, fit this model.

However, the model�in this case at least�is flawed. Bure baruta expresses the angst

of an individual lost in larger social mechanisms - a common theme in an area of the world

where subjugation by one regime after another has been par for the course. To rigidly label

the film as automatically being pro-Milo�ević is like labelling Franz Kafka as being pro-

Hapsburg for showing his characters in subjugation to bureaucracy. Paskaljević shows how

violence is bigger than individuals, and, moreover, there is some sense of Fate, poetic justice

and even morality which is larger than violence itself. The characters are repeatedly

lampooned in their belief that they are not to blame for what is happening (quite literally in

one scene) and their lack of faith in some morality which is a higher order than the brutality

which surrounds them.

This is more than can be said for most of the films shown at Raindance, which either

showed violence and revenge as the highest form of judgement (No� and Str�ljen), dispensed

with morality completely (Tri palme) or had an uneasy relationship with it (Točkovi and Do

koske).

Andrew James Horton





The Authors

Benjamin Halligan has published on counter-cultural and East European cinema.

His study of Bernado Bertolucci�s La Luna has just been published by Flicks Books, and he

is currently preparing a book on the life and films of Michael Reeves. He lectures in film at

the Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies, University of Wales, Aberystwyth.

Andrew James Horton graduated with an MA from the School of Slavonic and

East European Studies (University of London), having studied early Russian and Soviet

cinema. Whilst at the School, he was Editor of its peer-reviewed interdisciplinary journal

Slovo, to which he still submits occasional film reviews. After working as a film and music

critic for the (now defunct) Prague-based Internet journal The Electronic New Presence, he

became Culture Editor for Central Europe Review, a position he still holds.

Dina Iordanova has published extensively on Balkan and East European cinema.

She is contributing editor to The BFI Companion to Eastern European and Russian Cinema

(London, 2000). Her Cinema of Flames: Balkan Film, Culture, and the Media is forthcoming. She

teaches communication at the University of Leicester, UK. Click here to visit her website.

http://www.le.ac.uk/cmcr/di4/Main.html




Peter Krasztev has published volumes on film, anthropology and literature, has

worked as an editor on several cultural and political magazines (including Orpheus and

Beszélő) and is the director of five documentaries on Central-East European ethnic issues.

He currently holds positions at the Central European University, the University of Budapest

(ELTE) and the Institute for Literary Studies at the Hungarian Academy of Science. His

forthcoming volume entitled Kusturica: a balkáni ponyvaregény (Kusturica: The Balkan pulp

fiction) will be published in Hungarian and Serbian in 2001.

Igor Krstić was born in Yugoslavia but moved to Germany at the early age of two.

Having finished a Zwischenprüfung (German BA) in Comparative Literature and German

Studies at the University of Tübingen in 1996, he went on to study Film and Television

Studies at MA level at the University of Amsterdam. His dissertation topic was recent

Serbian films and how they reflect on the breakdown of Yugoslavia, nationalism and

problems of cultural identity. He is currently working as an online-journalist and also has a

placement with Reporters without Borders in Berlin.




Also of Interest... In Central Europe Review:

Balkan Hardcore Pop culture and paramilitarism Alexei Monroe Serbian Turbofolk generates paramilitarism and porno-nationalism, but is it just another face of Western pop culture? Click here to read the full article.

http://www.ce-review.org/00/24/monroe24.html




Moving into the Frame Croatian film in the 1990s Jurica Pavičić With its film industry in crisis, can Croatia still make a difference to world cinema? Click here to read the full article.

http://www.ce-review.org/00/19/kinoeye19_pavicic.html




Kinoeye Archive

Central Europe Review�s index of Internet resources on Central and East European cinema, including articles from the journal�s own regular film column.

Click here to visit the archive.

http://www.kinoeye.org/




Elsewhere:

Slovo

The interdisciplinary journal of Russian, Eurasian and East European affairs, published by postgraduates of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies (University of London). Vols 10, 11 and 12 contain contributions on Central and East European film by Benjamin Halligan and Andrew James Horton.

Click here to visit the journal�s homepage for more details of the contents of recent issues.

http://www.ssees.ac.uk/slovo.htm




The BFI Companion to Eastern European and Russian Cinema Richard Taylor, Julian Graffy, Nancy Wood and Dina Iordanova (eds) This work maps the rich, varied cinema of Eastern Europe, Russia and the former USSR. Over 200 entries cover a varitey of topics spanning a century of endeavour and turbulent history from Czech animation to Soviet montage. It includes entries on actors and directors and key figures like Eisenstein. Click here to buy the paperback version from Amazon.co.uk Click here to buy the hardback version from Amazon.co.uk






CER�s eBook Series

This ebook is one of the first in a series of electronic publications from Central

Europe Review focusing on topical issues in Central European politics, society and culture. We

hope that additional volumes on film will be among our future publications.

If you are interested in publishing an ebook through CER, we would like to hear

your proposal. CER ebooks can be anything from 10,000 words upwards, and the PDF

format can support hyperlinks to external websites, pictures, digital sound and video, when

supplied by the author.

To submit an ebook proposal on film-related topic, contact the Film Editor at:

[email protected]

To submit an ebook proposal on other topics, contact the Editor-in-Chief at:

[email protected]



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